Gleanings of the Week Ending August 2, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

The Atmospheres of the Solar System - An infographic rom Andy Brunnig

Are Crows Smarter Than Children? - The study showcases crows - ‘the Einsteins of the bird world.’

Pesticide linked to three generations of disease: Methoxychlor causes epigenetic changes - This study shows that some of the effects of man-made environmental changes go far beyond the time horizon we normally study in ‘safety’ trials.

Nearly 750,000 U.S. Weapons Are Unaccounted For In Afghanistan - Bad news. Will we seek to ‘clean up’ better in future conflicts?

The Lunar Surface as you’ve Never Seen It Before - For some reason, my first impression was that it looked like layers of thick finger paint.

Opossums and Gardening: A Few Things to Know - It turns out that they are mostly helpful!

A Post-Antibiotic Future? - A scary prospect. There was also another study about long term heal trends that was also unsettling: Life expectancy gains threatened as more older Americans suffer from multiple medical conditions.

Simple Meal-Planning Strategies for the Plant-Based Kitchen - These strategies make sense in every kind of kitchen! The CSA had changed my shopping pattern somewhat this summer but I have always tried to only make one trip to the grocery store per week.

Landmark Buildings That Were Never Supposed to Last This Long - Tidbits of history through buildings.

Drought Is Parching the United States from Underground, Too - Looks like water is going to become more precious - both on the surface and in the aquifers.

Fireworks

One of the communities near us sponsored a fireworks display last Saturday. We had gotten a postcard in the mail several weeks ago and agreed to go but forgot until we heard the fireworks begin. Fortunately we were able to drive to a good vantage point quickly - only missing the first 10 minutes or so. Fireworks and celebration are almost synonymous!

I grabbed my camera as we dashed out of the house and was pleased with the results. The Canon Powershot SX289 HS does a reasonable job of image stabilization. All the pictures in the slide show below were hand held!

The finale was a series of rockets that streamed upward in tight formation creating giant ‘sparklers’ in the sky. I couldn’t resist a picture of the super moon  after the end of the fireworks; it is included as the last image in the slide show. It looks like it is balanced on the tops of a tulip poplar and a pine.

Zooming - February 2014

I’ve been doing quite a bit of magnification recently with the microscope and loupe. The monthly ‘zooming’ post is done with cropped images from the camera - simply using the camera’s own built in zoom. Can you find: 

• The muffin liner
• The surprised squirrel
• The snow on crepe myrtle berries
• The icy pine
• The glowing knot in stained wood
• A sunrise through the oak branches
• An ice fall from a gutter
• Tulip poplar seed pod spires
• The moon through tree branches 

Telescope Memories

My telescope memories are all aligned with my husband: he’s the one that had a telescope from his early teenage years onward. By the time I met him in the early 70s, he had an 8 in reflector with a mount that was mostly cast iron. It was a team effort to assemble the mount because it was so heavy! I vividly remember a night during the summer before we got married when  we took the telescope out to the astronomy club’s observing site to observe a lunar eclipse. We discovered when we got back that my mother had gone out to see if there really was a lunar eclipse….that it wasn’t just an excuse we’d concocted for a late night date!

Now - over 40 years later - the telescopes have improved significantly. My husband has a new one with much more sophisticated electronics and a lighter weight mount. He set it up on our deck. There is too much light for the deck to ever be a prime observing spot and it was a marginal night weather wise…veils of clouds kept rolling by….but it was good enough for him to check out the equipment. Everything worked. I took a picture of the moon by aligning my camera to the eyepiece of the telescope!

So - it seem that both my husband and I are reverting to some hobbies we put aside when we were crunched for time during a peak career years…..me to my microscope and him to his telescope.