Chad Orzel's Blog, page 24

038/366: Cloudy Conjunction

In yesterday’s crude astrophotography post, I mentioned that the conjunction of Venus and the Moon would be closer this morning, but I took a shot of it yesterday because there’s no telling with the weather here this time of year. When I first went outside this morning, though, the sky was beautiful and clear and I said “Wow, that’ll be a great shot after all.”

Then I went inside to eat breakfast, and when I came back out, clouds had rolled in.

There were occasional breaks, though, and I did manage to get a fortuitous alignment of two of those with the bodies in question. which let me make the following composite from consecutive days:

Shots of the Moon and Venus from yesterday (left) and today (right).

These are cropped so the vertical scale is the same for both, and Venus is on the 1/3rd line up from the bottom. Today’s shot wasn’t quite framed the same as yesterday’s, though, thus the white space on the right, which would’ve been filled if I could get a full 4×6 crop at that scale.

Here’s a closer crop of today’s shot with the usual 4×6 aspect ratio:

Venus and the crescent Moon through clouds.

That composite of the two gives a nice sense of how things move in the sky, and I have other stuff I need to work on today, so we’ll call it the photo of the day, and move along.

037/366: Morning Star and Moon

One of the few problems with the new camera is that the Canon software that talks to it only runs on my laptop, not my home desktop. This is an issue partly because the laptop has less disk space (I got it with the biggest SSD available a few years ago, which is small compared to the spinny-disk drives in the desktop), but a bigger issue for image processing is the display, which shifts colors dramatically as you change the viewing angle. This isn’t a big issue for daylight photos of the kids, where the camera does pretty well already and the GIMP auto-level tool handles the few color issues that creep in. In low light, though, it’s next to impossible to figure out what the image really looks like.

And today’s photo of the day is a very low-light image:

The Moon and Venus from the back yard of Chateau Steelypips

That’s the crescent Moon and Venus just above some of the big trees behind our yard. These two have been creeping closer together over the last few days, something I’ve noticed because my morning walk with Emmy is now starting before sunrise. They’ll probably be even closer tomorrow, and the Moon smaller, but the weather around here at this time of year is not terribly reliable, and I figured I should take this shot while I could. If I get a better version tomorrow, well, I’ll see about cropping it in a way that illustrates the relative motion nicely.

This was taken hand-held, with the f/1.8 50mm lens, and the exposure time cranked down pretty short; the automatic routine on the camera wanted it to be long enough that everything got blurred. I could probably get a better image with the tripod, but I was being lazy and the dog was waiting for her walk.

The sky in the original image appears quite a bit darker than it did live (because our eyes are rather non-linear in their response to light), and tweaking it in GIMP was a huge pain on the laptop. This is still on the too-dark side (looking at it on the desktop monitor), but it looks nice, so I decided to quite while I was ahead.

036/366: Pine Bush

The difficult-to-spell name “Schenectady” (where Union is located) derives from a Mohawk word meaning “beyond the pines.” The pines in question are an extensive region of pine barrens between Albany and Schenectady, a small bit of which survives as the Albany Pine Bush Nature Preserve. They’ve got a nice little nature center and some trails through the pine bush, and I took The Pip down there this morning, because his day care was closed again for the last of the fall block of Jewish holidays. Here’s a shot to give you an idea of the landscape:

Plants in the Pine Bush Nature Preserve.

Unfortunately, this was as far as we got into the preserve, as the Little Dude wanted nothing to do with any kind of outdoor activity. He rampaged around the (rather small) visitor center for a while, and after lunch was very happy to run in circles in one of the local shopping malls, but he just did not want to be outside, despite the fact that it was a beautiful day today.

As someone who grew up in a rural area, I find this very frustrating, but, you know, there are worse forms of rebellion. I’m going to have to go back there by myself one of these days, to get a real look around.

Tomorrow, we’re done with Jewish holidays, and back to the regular day care routine. And while I did have a lot of fun hanging out with The Pip, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a relief to be handing him off to somebody else to entertain during the day…

035/366: Trike Rack

Another fall day, another holiday closing at the JCC. I was home with The Pip for most of the day, which was the usual mix of fun, exhausting, and puzzling. For example, while I offered several times to go out to a playground before lunch, he refused. But then insisted that we walk to the store to buy… something. I got this picture with my phone:

The Pip’s bike in the rack at the Co-Op.

Because it amused me to see a bike rack with just a little red tricycle in it.

We did go to a couple of playgrounds later, and I shot some video that I’ll use for physics-y stuff at some point. But this is as good a photo-of-the-day as anything else I got.

Just one more Jewish holiday to get through, tomorrow, then it’s smooth sailing for a few weeks at least…

034/366: Dinner

A big chunk of Sunday was lost to a wretched cold– despite a two-hour afternoon nap, I was asleep by 10pm– but I did get the camera out for a bit while doing some late-season grilling:

Pork chops on the grill.

Not the most amazing photo, I know (though it does take deliberate work to get those cross-hatched grill marks…), but it pairs well with this:

Thermal camera image of pork chops on the grill.

Which is the same basic scene in the infrared. Because I have a thermal camera, so why not?

033/366: Ommmm…..

Saturdays are the busiest days around Chateau Steelypips, with both SteelyKid and The Pip having soccer in the morning (in two different places), then lunch, then some sort of activity for the afternoon. Yesterday, this was a party for one of SteelyKid’s friends. And last night, there was a Movie Night at SteelyKid’s BFF’s house, where the kids all watched a cartoon and the adults hung around reveling in adult conversation.

All of which means that I managed to go the entire day without taking any photos. Not even a cell-phone snapshot (I’m assistant coaching SteelyKid’s soccer team, but the other coach wasn’t there this week, so I was on my own, which doesn’t allow for photography).

So, here’s a shot of The Pip from Friday night:

The Pip “meditating.”

Since our trip to DC back in July, the kids have been nuts for the Cartoon Network show “Teen Titans Go.” One of the characters, Raven, uses magic as her power, and spends a bunch of time floating in the air and meditating. The Pip finds this fascinating, and will periodically declare that he’s meditating, striking this pose. Usually with a scrunched-up intense face that doesn’t suggest contemplation of the infinite, but this shot was in a sort of transitional moment, and actually looks vaguely meditative.

And it’s cute, so works as a “sorry for no new photos” offering…

032/366: Symmetry

Took the camera along this afternoon when I took Emmy for a walk (Kate and I are going to see The Martian tonight, so Emmy got an early dinner and stroll), and took pictures of a bunch of random stuff in a little park near our house. Including these two pictures pasted together into one:

Two tree trunks in a park near Chateau Steelypips.

These two trees aren’t right next to each other, but I didn’t do much more than turn 90 degrees to get from one to the other. If I were attempting to pass myself off as an artiste, I would explain that this juxtaposition here is a political allegory: the tree on the right is encrusted with nasty old fungus, the tree on the left is ringed with a climbing green vine, but they’re both being killed by the stuff attached to them.

Send me my giant paycheck, Art World…

Really, though, I just liked the color and texture contrasts of these, which is why I took the two individual shots. And when I had them up side-by-side to try to choose one for the photo of the day, they looked good together, so I said “What the hell, I’ll combine them in GIMP.”