Harley’s Pond at low tide, Christmas Eve 2024. No snow for us, though we have seen a sliver of ice on the pond once or twice. We had no rain at all in October, and just 1.6″ from Tropical Storm Debbie in August. Total rainfall to date since July 1st is 14.3″.
A government website says “The Youghiogheny River Reservoir is approximately …16 miles long with … an average depth of 54 ft and a maximum depth of 121 ft…”. It’s crossed by US Route 40, known at one time as the National Road, and always a convenient stop for a picnic on the journey between home and Dad’s. On holiday weekends in the summer it has powerboats and sometimes water skiiers. But thanks to this year’s drought, Elspeth and Tim’s family found it almost dry, and got to walk onto the old bridge built many years before the reservoir was there. The first picture shows the current road bridge, way up in the air above Cora.
About 11pm, October 10th. Our largest northern exposure (through the trees) is from the bottom of the driveway, looking up the street. I had a vague idea I might be sensing some pinkness in the haze, but wasn’t sure I wasn’t imaging it. With the big camera on a tripod, in the dark I couldn’t remember how to do a time exposure of more than 15 seconds. Looked like all I got was black. But later in Lightroom, I maximized the exposure, then saved these three shots.
We had our weekly Zoom chat April 7th. Gareth said “Today’s clear sky was great for eclipse photo dry runs… Spent hours fussing with cardboard filter-adapters and such.” He’s the only one of us living in the Zone of Totality.
Sandy and I weren’t in the zone of totality, and we’d heard we’d only get about an 86% eclipse. We sat on the porch for the duration. Assuming only 14% of sunlight, we’d expected our afternoon to get much darker than the slight reduction we experienced. Another puzzle for me was it seemed as though the moon didn’t cross the sun in a straight line. It entered the sun from the lower right, seemed to move straight right-to-left, then veered upwards and departed from the top middle. (Somebody living only a few miles from us made a Facebook post showing exactly how we saw the eclipse.) Gareth thought if we’d viewed the eclipse at noon from the equator, then the path might have been straight. Here’s Nick’s photo of Dad, followed by one or two more for the scrapbook.
Another view, via Facebook and a NASA website:
We had a few days at the beach in early August. We all rode bikes, we walked, some of us went running at sunrise, we sat on the beach, played in the sand, ate and drank. Wore plenty of sunblock and needed lots of insect repellant for the wildlife refuge. No sunburn or shipwrecks and nobody drowned. We also saw a big NASA rocket launched (see separate page). Various photographers. You can hover on the edge of a photo to a show description and pause the slideshow — then un-hover to resume the slideshow.
From the Belmont newsletter at GariMelchers.org:
“After an absence of nine months, Gari and Corinne Melchers’ thirty hour long case clock work has returned from the clockmaker’s repair shop. Mr. Mark R. Pellman of Ashland, Virginia performed the repairs, aside from the micro-welding of the gears which had to be sent away. The beautifully incised pewter face was fashioned by a craftsman named Rahier from Eupen, Belgium, as inscribed. The face is not original to the works behind it, nor are either the face or works original to the long case. The case was probably made in the 19th century in Holland or Germany, while the works and face probably are one hundred years older.”
