Zooming – April 2024
/Flowers (Nixa and Springfield MO, Sherman TX), – birds (Nixa and Springfield MO) – solar eclipse (Poplar Bluff MO)….a lot of zoomed images this month. Enjoy the 2024 slide show!
Ten Little Celebrations – April 2024
/April 2024 has been even more full of little celebrations than usual; it was challenging to choose the top 10!
Traveling with my daughter. Taking a road trip to Dallas (a familiar trek) is quite different when my daughter to with me. We start the driving a bit later and, this time, we stopped in Joplin on the way home for lunch. I celebrated the time in the car…the great conversation.
The life of a cousin. It was bittersweet to go to the funeral of a cousin that was younger than me…but it was clearly a celebration of her life.
20 puzzles for $2 each. The Friends of the Library book sale in my county included puzzles and I celebrated getting 20 of them for my dad and the other residents at his assisted living group home. I also celebrated a return to volunteering - helping with the book sale.
iPhone 15 Pro Max. Getting a new phone is always cause to celebrate….even though I started out a little anxious that it would a little challenging to go from my old Android phone to an iPhone; it was a pleasant surprise to realize it was pretty easy. The only downside was the reduced functionality of the Windows phone link app for text messages; that issue was resolved as soon as I transitioned to a Mac later in the month.
MacBook Air 15”. More new technology I am celebrating; it only took about 24 hours for me to become a fan of the Mac after using Intel-based machines since the 1980s.
Irises. The plants bloomed all at once. In one bed the stalks were too tall for them to remain standing to I cut them to enjoy indoors – celebrated the buds opening all along the stems.
14 ducklings. Seeing Mom Mallard with her ducklings is a great celebration of spring.
Solar Eclipse. So glad we made the effort to position ourselves to see a 2nd solar eclipse (the 1st for me was in 2017). It’s a phenomenon rare enough to be a celebration.
Belted Kingfisher. Celebrating a bird I didn’t expect to see around our neighborhood pond.
Kite and Pinata Festival. The botanical garden is a great place for outdoor celebrations like this.
Solar Eclipse – Part 2
/Last week I posted about my pre-eclipse experience. Today’s post has photos of the eclipse itself. I used my bridge camera (Canon Powershot SX70 HX) on a tripod with a solar filter for most of them. Both my skill and camera improved since the 2017 eclipse when I was using a Canon Powershot SX730 HS with the same filter. I compose my shots such that the camera stays in P (program) mode and autofocuses. The only setting change made was the +/- exposure compensation during totality. My ‘best shots’ for the 2024 eclipse included:
Two areas of sunspots (pre-eclipse)
First contact
Further along
Only one sunspot still visible
Frown in the sky
Diamond ring (no filter)
Baily’s beads and solar flares/prominences (no filter)
More solar flares/prominences (no filter)
Corona (no filter)
Nearing the end of totality (no filter)
Diamond ring (no filter)
Smile in the sky
I took one picture with my phone holding my solar glasses over the lens after totality. I was klutzy to hold…but worthwhile to try.
My husband had an app running that was providing prompts leading up to totality…when to remove filters…the mid-point of totality…filters back on. It was good to have the audio rather than having to check the time some other way. He had a more complex set up with several higher end cameras – one of which had automated tracking (which didn’t work quite the way he expected). These were his three favorite totality shots.
The road trip home was prolonged with heavy traffic. A lot of people traveled to see the eclipse, and all were heading home afterward at about the same time. We stopped for dinner along the way and the traffic cleared a little. It was a long day for us: leaving home at 5:30 AM and returning at 9:30 PM. It was worth it!
Here is a mosaic of my pictures featured above plus others. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version.
Solar Eclipse – Part 1
/We traveled from our home near Springfield MO to Poplar Bluff MO for the solar eclipse on April 8th. There was a flurry of activity on the day before the event to finalize our destination; the weather forecast was the key driver for us to choose Poplar Bluff (along with Whitely Park being a good location that was not included as part of the event planning by the city).
We left our house at 5:30 AM to pick up our daughter and son-in-law before heading east; it wasn’t long before sunrise. I took some pictures of it through the windshield of the car (my husband did all the driving).
We did not encounter any heavy traffic during our morning drive…got to the park 2 hours before the first contact…plenty of time for set up and looking around the park. We set up on an asphalt parking lot that never completely filled up so we spilled over onto the two spaces on either side of where we were parked next to a fenced soccer field.
I walked around to look at a few low growing plants…
And trees that were just beginning to leaf out. I realized that the trees did no have enough foliage to make projected crescent patterns onto the ground as happened when we were in Loup City, Nebraska for the August 2017 solar eclipse.
On the ground – I noted roots of a sycamore, seed pods of sweet gums (from last year and green ones from this year) and a clump of green (probably a weed) surrounded by brown thatch.
There were birds about:
Two purple martin houses that were beginning to be populated. One had a pair of house sparrows too; I wondered how long it would take for the purple martins to evict them.
A starling in the grass – keeping an eye on the sky.
And a group of robins in a tree without leaves but lots of twigs that made it hard to get a good image.
I took most of my eclipse pictures with my bridge camera (Canon Powershot SX70 HX) on a tripod with a solar filter taped to the camera body to cover the lens until totality). I had eclipse glasses that I wore to look at the sun with my eyes and put over the camera on my iPhone to take one picture. I’ll post my eclipse pictures on Sunday along with some my husband took…stay tuned for that.
Gleanings of the Week Ending March 16, 2024
/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.
Heat Pumps Are Still a Good Investment Even If Your Grid Is Powered By Coal - If every American home with gas, oil, or inefficient electric resistance heating swap those things out for heat pumps, the emissions of the entire U.S. economy would shrink by 5% to 9%. That’s how powerful a decarbonizing tool heat pumps are.
Asian Elephants Bury Their Dead - In India, five dead elephant calves were found buried on their backs in irrigation ditches, with evidence that multiple herd members had participated in the burials. Are there more examples? It doesn’t seem likely that elephants would be able to move an adult elephant like they did the calves. Do they do something else with the carcass rather than burial?
COVID-19 virus can stay in the body more than a year after infection – So – if it persists in blood, should these people not be donating blood? Does this mean that people could get COVID from a blood transfusion?
Archeoastronomy uses the rare times and places of previous total solar eclipses to help us measure history – What we learn from historical eclipses….a timely history lesson with the 4/8 total eclipse that will be visible from much of the US coming soon.
An Eruption for Galápagos Iguanas – The La Cumbre volcano is erupting in the Galapagos. Some satellite views from NASA including a description of the instrumentation available to monitor this eruption.
An obsessed insect hunter: The creepy-crawly origins of daylight savings – We did it again last weekend…changed to daylight savings time. I wish we could stop (don’t care whether we stay permanently on standard or daylight savings…just that we don’t change) but we don’t seem to be able to stop. This post is about George Hudson…and his desire for more daylight after work to study insects! I’ll browse some of his books on Internet Archive.
Solar Accounted for More Than Half of New Power Installed in U.S. Last Year - Solar accounted for most of the capacity the nation added to its electric grids last year. That feat marks the first time since World War II, when hydropower was booming, that a renewable power source has comprised more than half of the nation’s energy additions. Texas and California led a solar surge driven mostly by utility-scale installations, which jumped 77 percent year-over-year to 22.5 gigawatts. The residential and commercial sectors also reached new milestones. The biggest open question is how quickly projects can connect to the grid.
An inside look at Beech tree disease – A fast spreading disease….killing another tree species. It hasn’t been that long ago that Emerald Ash Borer wiped out the ash trees. We were just noticing sickly beeches in Maryland before we moved…realizing that the forests would be profoundly changed without beech trees.
Professional Photographer Shares How to Photograph the Great North American Solar Eclipse Safely – Time to start preparing for 4/8/2024!
America’s Sinking East Coast – There are multiple reasons that areas are sinking faster than melting ice and thermal expansion from climate change would cause.
Gleanings of the Week Ending January 13, 2024
/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.
What were the death tolls from pandemics in history? – The two most recent ones are COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS. Death from the 1918-1920 flu pandemic was larger than both together….and the population of the world was less then too.
Moments of hope and resilience from the climate frontlines – Drought then intense rains leading to rolling blackouts, damage to infrastructure, agriculture failures, mosquito spread diseases. Heat stress leading to deaths of people and wildlife, wildfires. Protecting and rehabilitating damaged habitats. A new normal….not anyone ready. Heat officers to help residents cope. Coastal erosion (caused by coastal development, rising sea levels and storm surges). Taking two years rather than one to dry firewood in Lapland. Solar panels positive impact on health care in India (and anywhere where electric power is unreliable). Crop irrigation required where it previously was not. Learning from our past, simpler lifestyles.
European Imports of Russian Pipeline Gas Dropped by Half Last Year - Europe has implemented measures to conserve energy and has ramped up wind and solar power. Last year, Germany, the largest economy in Europe, drew more than half of its power from renewables for the first time.
NASA Captures Stunning Images of Jupiter’s Moon Io on Closest Flyby in 20 Years – Image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Io is the most volcanically active planetary body in our solar system with 100s of volcanos.
Christmas Trees on the Beach – The innovative ways communities are using the cut trees after Christmas!
How humans have changed the Earth’s surface in 2023 – Overhead pictures tell stories of the past year. The picture of the drained Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine was startling.
Photographer Travels Europe to Document Incredible Starling Murmurations – I see smaller murmurations every road trip….never in a situation to photograph them! They are not always starlings. I remember seeing one in Florida that was tree swallows.
Could Climate Change Cause More Lakes to Turn Bright Pink? – Single-celled, salt-loving halobacteria. There is a new pink pond at the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge in Hawaii…but it has been happening in the Great Salt Lake’s North Arm for several decades. The number of pink ponds could increase with warmer temperatures increasing evaporation (and increasing the salinity of waters).
Next Solar Eclipse, In April, Expected to Attract Upwards Of 4 Million Tourists - Great American Eclipse has developed a geographic model to estimate how many people will travel to see the April eclipse. This model predicts that between 1 and 4 million people will travel to the path of totality. Texas is expected to receive the majority of visitors, followed by Indiana, Ohio, New York, Arkansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Oklahoma, Maine, and New Hampshire.
U.S. Dietary Committee considers if the potato is a vegetable or a grain - Agriculture officials say the average American consumes about 50 pounds of potatoes each year.
Zooming – June 2021
/Back home in Maryland…enjoying familiar places that seem fresh again after being away for a month. Most images – as usual – are plants but there are cicadas and dragonflies and sunrise…and a black-crowned night heron too. Enjoy the slideshow!
Ten Little Celebrations – June 2021
/After being away from home in May…being in Maryland again rippled with little celebrations associated with home. Here are my top 10 little celebrations from June 2021:
Scenic drive from Lexington KY to home. Light traffic, good highway, beautiful scenery….I took a picture to celebrate being back in Maryland.
Farmers Market. I’ve been going every week and it’s a celebration every time. The piles of produce fresh from the local farms (and artisan bread) make it a happy errand…and then I enjoy the bounty in meals all during the week. It’s a great substitute for belonging to a CSA (which is not practical for me this year because of my traveling).
A good watermelon. There was a sign in the produce section of Wegmans for seeded watermelons. I always remember them from my childhood….sweeter than the ones without seeds that we find more frequently in stores today. I bought one – hoping it would live up my expectations. And it did. Celebrating a watermelon as good as I remembered!
Yard work. An hour of work (several of them on mornings when it is still cool enough to be pleasant)…2 wheelbarrow loads to the brush pile or compost bin….celebrating a neater yard and satisfaction of encouraging native species.
Apple crisp. While I was away, my husband did curbside pickup for his groceries. He somehow got a huge bag of apples. Some of the excess apples made a great apple crisp…celebrating bounty (and not wasting food).
Howard County Conservancy Mt Pleasant. Every time I hike there, there is something new to celebrate – most recently dragonflies and a black-crowned night heron.
Maryland sunrise and partial solar eclipse. Celebrating being in the right place at the right time to see it.
New crowns. I had anticipated that getting 3 new crowns was going to be uncomfortable but was pleasantly surprised that my expectation was way over the top; there was almost no discomfort during the drilling or sensitive areas afterward…. celebrated that it happened that way.
New computer glasses. Hurray for seeing better…and the red frames.
The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty talks. There were 4 days of webinars….and I found many of them very thought provoking. I celebrated the content…and that they were made available by the sponsors of the virtual conference. (Day 1: https://tinyurl.com/4t7zjv72 Day 2: https://tinyurl.com/2f9n4b72 Day 3: https://tinyurl.com/48rbba2k Day 4: https://tinyurl.com/5bbey7pr)
Maryland Sunrise and Partial Solar Eclipse
/We got up at 5 AM yesterday to get to a location my husband had scouted out the day before to view the partial solar eclipse that would be happening as the sun came up. Our house is surrounded by trees that block a clear view of the eastern horizon….but we didn’t have far to go. We used the turn our of the Gorman Farms CSA! We got their about 10 minutes before sunrise. I started taking pictures of the horizon pre-sunrise. At first we weren’t sure exactly where the sun was going to appear but we eventually saw the brighter glow in the trees at the horizon.
We heard and saw birds….a squirrel on the split rail fence…deer in the nearby mowed field. It was a great set up for the big event even though we knew the clouds were probably going to obscure the somewhat (or maybe completely).
In the end, we had a brief view of the sun before the cloud deck covered it. My husband got a few pictures (below). We were using the filters we purchased to observe the total eclipse back in 2017. The few seconds the sun was visible were not long enough for me to get a picture!
New Masks
/I bought 3 new masks since I want to have plenty to last me between laundry days….and it’s hot enough that I might want a fresh one if I’m out in the afternoon for very long. I ordered them from Society6.
These masks are heritage type prints – from books I was familiar with. The poppy and dandelion are from Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (available from Internet Archive here). I browsed through it back in 2009.
The solar eclipse one is from Etienne Leopold Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings (available from Internet Archive here). I browsed the images in 2019.
These masks are a little different than the 2 I already am using so I’ll wear one for an hour or so around the house to make sure it is comfortable enough for the time it takes to pickup my CSA share (and cut some flowers/herbs in the cutting garden) and buy groceries. I am going to keep a Ziploc of fresh masks in the car for the foreseeable future.
Unique Activities for Yesterday:
Tweaking the office. I am back to using my bouncy Swopper chair in front of my computer. It seems I am becoming pickier about how my office ‘fits’ my needs with being at home so much of the time. My back is happy today!
Breakfast picnic. I cut up the cantaloupe in chunks and cooked scrambled eggs. My husband cooked hash browns and bacon. And we ate the big breakfast out on our deck. It was the most pleasant temperature of the day. We were fortified enough to mow the yard about 30 minutes later….and that was the extent of our time outdoors until dusk when I went out to cut some day lilies that were blooming in the front flowerbed; I’ll enjoy them in a vase rather than taking the chance of the deer eating the flowers and buds.
Gleanings of the Week Ending September 2, 2017
/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.
Yoga and meditation improve mind-body health and stress resilience – A study that went beyond anecdotal reports of positive effects. They looked at brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and activity in the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) and inflammation markers.
20+ Spectacular Photos From the…Solar Eclipse and NASA’s Best Photos of the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse – Photo series from the web of the 8/21/2017 solar eclipse.
Dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain – Dancing is more effective than endurance training! Both dancing and endurance training increase the area of the brain that declines with age but dancing improves balance too!
The big idea: 5 ways to be a more thoughtful traveler – The articles ‘5’ are: know some history, think about how you’ll document your trip, read a book set wherever you’re going, learn some of the language, and understand where you come from. Good ideas!
10 Really Weird Animals of the Anthropocene and Tongue Orchids & Corpseflowers: 7 insanely weird plant species – There is so much to learn about plants and animals…sometimes because they are changing and sometimes because they are hard to find/rare.
Trying to Create Something Different in the Nebraska Sandhills – I couldn’t resist this one…since I just visit Nebraska for the first time recently.
Image of the Day: Flying Blood Bag – The entwined network of blood vessels in a pigeon’s CT scan.
Our brains to change from early to mid-adulthood – The changes observed were so highly correlated to age that the researchers could estimate the ages of an individual simply by looking at the brain scan. 111 scans were analyzed from volunteers 18-55 years old.
On Education in the 21st Century – A paper by Richard Watson (futurist) for the Australia’s Department of Education. It talks about Slow Education (people centric, reflective, and aim to ensure that individual appreciate where the things they consume come from…emphasizes the importance of local difference, craft and quality over standardized production and cheap ingredients).
Interactive Infographic: The Global Business of Dying – The laws governing how terminally ill patients can choose to die vary widely – around the world and in the US (link to the US map is at the bottom of the global post).
Solar Eclipse - August 2017
/The 2017 Eclipse occurred one week ago – and I’m posting about our experience today!
We were concerned that York, Nebraska – where we had originally planned to be to observe the eclipse - would be cloudy so we’d looked at maps and weather forecasts the evening before and decided to drive 1.5 hours west and north to Loup City, Nebraska. It was a short drive west along the Interstate and then through farms. We made a ‘rest’ stop in Cairo, Nebraska since there were several locations in Loup City and we weren’t sure how long it would take to find things/what facilities would be available.
The first location we found was perfect: Jenners Park in Loup Nebraska. There was a playground and bit trees. I walked around to look at the place before the eclipse started.
Then I came back and put my camera on a tripod with a solar filter ready for the eclipse to start.
My husband had a fancier set up with two cameras on a telescope mount (so it would track) and another tripod with a camera to take video during totality.
My daughter enjoyed the event without a camera….although she did give in a take some pictures during totality with her cell phone. Other families enjoyed Jenners Park as well and there were pleasant conversations as the eclipse progressed. There were several people with connections to University of Arizona where my daughter just finished graduate school!
One of the cottonwoods near the street had the effect of a pinhole projection system for the eclipse. The first time I noticed it was earlier in the eclipse…and the second was much closer to totality…just a sliver of the sun shining. I hurried back to my camera to observe totality.
The slide show below shows my pictures as the eclipse started and through totality. Note the sunspots in the early pictures and the shadow blocking them as the moon moved between Earth and the sun.
Previous posts about our Solar Eclipse trek: Road Trip to Nebraska for the Eclipse, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
Road Trip to Nebraska for the Eclipse
/
We were in Nebraska for the eclipse last Monday having driven from Maryland --> Pennsylvania --> Ohio --> Indiana --> Illinois --> Iowa --> Nebraska on the two days prior to the eclipse. I am writing about the road trip to Nebraska today and will be posting about the rest of our eclipse adventure over the next week. We started out very early last Saturday. Our only stop in Maryland was the South Mountain rest area which is becoming a familiar stopping point for us on the way to Pittsburg or State College. 
On Saturday, we were heading to Pittsburgh to pick up our daughter along way. We stopped at the rest stop/welcome center to Pennsylvania then two service areas along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s a scenic drive and I enjoyed a peanut butter cookie purchased at the North Midway stop. We arrived at the Pittsburgh (Squirrel Hill) apartment by mid-morning.
We were back on the road and into Ohio shortly. We stopped at rest areas along the toll road (fortunately our Maryland E-ZPass tags worked for the entire trip). The first two areas had a round area where there were several options for lunch; my daughter and I chose Panera Bread at the first stop and my husband got his McDonalds lunch at the second. The third stop had a barrel vault roof.
We continued into Indiana making a rest stop along the highway and then at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for a hike (more on that in a subsequent post) and then to our hotel in Lansing, Illinois. The next morning, we were off again after a hearty breakfast at the hotel. There were two rest stops as we crossed the state. There was a Monarch not quite warm enough to be fluttering around. It seemed to have lost a lot of scales since it looked more brown than orange.
Iowa has some themed rest stops depicting the history and energy production of the state. The tall white obelisk in the second picture is a blade of a wind turbine! The art work inside (glass etching and floor tile) was appealing.
And then we were in Nebraska – making one rest stop before arriving at our hotel in York, Nebraska. The day we arrive was clear but the forecast for eclipse day was lots of clouds. We were looking at maps and the track of the eclipse….trying to figure out whether we should head west or east on eclipse day.
Preparing for the Solar Eclipse
/
Are you ready for the solar eclipse on Monday, 8/21? We’ve been planning where we will be and backup locations in case of clouds. My husband has solar filters for our cameras and glasses for our eyes. He also has an app to prompt us to look for certain features as the eclipse happens. He set up his two-camera rig on his telescope mount and I tried my camera on a regular tripod. The filter for my camera fits over the lens when the camera is turned on.
I was somewhat concerned that I might have to do some manual focusing but the camera autofocus algorithm seems to do well enough if the sun is in the center of the image. I took this picture earlier this week (with the filter). Do you see the sunspot (very faint…but there) in the right of the image?
More on the eclipse after it happens…
