Part-time prevaricator
Update: ha ha, whoops, I used the wrong word. It wasn’t twilight, because the sun was still above the horizon. I suppose it was more like evening’s golden hour.
I’m leaving the title, though, and the URL. So it goes.
I grabbed my camera and went for a short walk just as the sun was going down.
On Sunday, I took my camera on a 30km bike ride, and got a few photos.
I reformatted an old memory card from my camera today, and before I did I cleared the old photos off it. They turned out to be from 2012. Here are a few of them.
Continue reading “Throwback Thurs—uh, Saturday”
Well, spring in Manitoba: 20°C today, threatening snow this weekend.
But I saw a robin on the lawn today, chowing down on worms.
This is largely a “note to self” post, but others might be interested too: NASA has a gallery on their website dedicated to images from Artemis II’s lunar flyby.
Here’s the full text from the “Earthset” image above:
Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation.
Image Credit: NASA
You can download this and other high-resolution Artemis II images from the gallery.
My single favourite April Fools’ Day joke came about sometime in the first decade of this century. An online entertainment news source posted a story about how Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun tetralogy[1]Sort of. I guess it depends how you count Urth of the New Sun. had finally—finally—been picked up by Hollywood for an adaptation.
It was to be directed by one Michael Bay.
(If you know why this is funny, then you are—like me—a nerd.)
I just remembered a second great April Fools’ Day joke. Back in the day when X was still Twitter, and was only kind of terrible instead of being a full-on Nazi bar, there was a parody account called @stats_canada[2]They’re still there, but haven’t posted since 2021.. They would post ridiculous statistics—eg, “50% of looking smart while watching the Olympics is just muttering “poor form” every few minutes”.
One year, on April 1st, they posted nothing but accurate Canadian statistics.
Header image by Luke Jernejcic on Unsplash.
Last night the aurora data were decent, and the sky was clear and crisp, the stars shining brightly. I packed up my gear and headed out.
Continue reading “Aurora, Orion, and the crescent moon”
Kathleen came home from a coffee-with-the-ladies evening and said, “You should go take some pictures.” The sky was mostly clear and the night was warm, so I did.
The sky to the north was pretty busy, as you can probably tell from the star trails at the top of this post. I was about a mile from the end of the runway at the Brandon airport, and I think someone was doing night takeoff and landing practice, because a prop plane—maybe a Hercules, but I’m not sure it was quite loud enough—passed through my shot three or four times. And then there are all the satellite tracks, my word.
I also managed to get Jupiter and two of its moons (Io and Ganymede, if I’m reading this right).
And Orion was nice and bright, too. This is a stack of three photos, all taken at 50mm, f/1.8, 10 seconds, ISO 400. I wish the focus was slightly better.
All told I was out there for about an hour. As I was packing up my gear, I heard a coyote start yipping.
I didn’t catch any aurora last night, but I did get some light pillars.
“The first draft is you telling yourself the story.”
—Sir Terry Pratchett
Well, I’ve got a first draft written. After all’s said and done, “There’s Nothing Good at the Top” clocked in at 19,850 words.
Continue reading “Draft 1: done”