Northern Lights?

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.

Solar Eclipse, 8 April 2024

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:

Chincoteague, Virginia

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.

Rahier’s Column Clock

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.”