Part-time prevaricator
Today I went a bit over 13km at an average speed of 17.9km/h. The new bike is definitely faster; I didn’t feel like I was putting in any particular effort, but on my old bike I’d have been doing about 15km/h, maybe 16 on a good day.
I may not be ready but I guess it’s here. At least it’s pretty.
Taken from my back yard.
There weren’t any stars to be seen last night through the fog and the clouds, but I stopped on my way home from a friend’s wedding social in Onanole to catch some more earthbound light.
Jupiter is currently about as close as it gets to Earth. I went out tonight hoping to catch some aurora, but the show was pretty meh. So I aimed my 250mm lens at Jupiter instead, and caught it with its moons (left to right) Ganymede, Europa, Io, and Callisto.
I rode about 18.5km and snapped a couple photos down at the community gardens. A sunflower:
…and a grafittied bench.
Blackbirds, blackbirds up in a tree
Traditional rhyme
Count them, count them, what do they see?
One for sorrow, two for joy
Three for a girl, four for a boy
Five for silver, six for gold
Seven for a secret that’s never been told
I’ve been leaving the fallen leaves where they lay in my yard. I’ve heard it’s good for the local ecology, given beneficial bugs and small rodents a place to winter outside.
The other day, a squadron of blackbirds came for a visit. Seems I may have left them some snacks. Circle of life, I suppose.
Update: I have been informed that these are probably grackles. Please update your poetry reading to suit.
We went down to Boissevain on the weekend to help out with the Dunrea Flea Market[1]It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea., and stayed over at our friends’ farmhouse a few miles south of town. There were a few shows put on by the Northern Lights that night; I caught one of them. They danced for about 20 minutes while I watched. Here are some of the photos I got.
I tried to capture a panorama, to show just how much of the sky was involved. Unfortunately my image-stitching program balked at creating a panorama; the aurora were moving too much for the software to find similarities in the photos. I manually aligned them instead.
And I did up a quick timelapse. The 33 seconds of video represents about 33 minutes of photos, each one a 5‑second exposure.
When the show was winding down, I turned around and saw that the Milky Way was high above the farm. One more photo, I thought, then I’ll go inside.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | It rather outgrew the available space in Dunrea. |
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My friend Tim was camping at Wasagaming, as is his wont on the September long weekend. I went to visit on Friday evening.
We headed up to Spruces to check out the sunset…
…and the moon.
Later, the galaxy appeared as the moon set.
And I decided to try to catch Jupiter with my 55–250mm lens, which is usually too shaky at 250mm. It seems to have worked. (If I’m reading this right, the moons are, L‑R, Callisto, Europa, and Io.)
After I dropped Tim off at his campsite, I saw that the aurora were making an appearance. I stopped in a few places (the beach in Wasagaming[1]Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach, the dock on the golf course road, and on the roadside on #10 highway).
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Man, I really don’t like the orange lights at the beach |
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How’d I do against my goals?
All in all, this was a good retreat. As always, I wish it had been longer, but you know what they say: so it goes.
