Yesterday morning the snow lay heavy on the branches. I snapped a few photos before it all melted away.
You might think these photos are black-and-white, but I assure you, they’re colour photos.
Overnight snow
Blog
Goals, Nov. 2023
Hoo boy, I haven’t done one of these in a while.
- Attack NaNoWriMo, though I don’t think I’m going to go for 50,000 words
- If the weather and space weather permits, get out for some aurora photos
- Set a good example for my mentee
Yep, I’m a mentor again. Good luck to us both.
Hollow Bean 2023: The Costumes
We had 17 Halloweeners[1]Halloweenies? ring our bell last night, which is two more than last year. A pleasant surprise, especially considering how cold it was.
The costumes:
- Iron Man
- Pretty Princess
- Unicorn (these three were very young; the princess was mostly being carried by Mom)
- Mermaid with a hand-knit Pikachu toque
- Sparkly Witch
- Kid in Parka (he might have had a costume under there; hard to say)
- Kitty Cat
- Plague Doctor in a fleece unicorn onesie
- Another Unicorn (fleece onesies might be the new parkas)
- Witch
- Skeleton (x2)
- Men in Black (x2) (I’m just glad they didn’t neuralize us)
- Shark
- Zombie in a fleece bathrobe
- Clown in a fleece bathrobe
At 9:15 we turned off the light, since there hadn’t been anyone at our door in over 45 minutes.
Seems we bought juuuust the right amount of candy; there’s only a couple bars left over for us. Phew.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Halloweenies? |
|---|
Hollow Bean 2023
Happy Hollow Bean, everyone!
“Who holds this celebration?”
“The children, who actually rule the Blue Planet of Earth. They are more intelligent than the older people and outrun them on bicycles.”
—William Kotzwinkle, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet
Aurora, Oct. 20th, 2023
I was out from about 10:30pm till midnight, which—judging from some of the other photos I’ve seen—was too early for the real show. Regardless, there was a haze at the horizon and I set up my cameras.
In the video, one second is one minute of real-time. The first minute and a half is from a camera pointed straight north; the remainder is aimed northwest.
Sunset, Oct. 18, 2023
The clouds caught my eye, so I grabbed my camera.
A moody Manitoba morning
It was a bit misty out this morning.
I snapped a few photos. The nearest trees in the photo are quite close; the furthest visible tree is less than half a block away.
Nerdy details: HDR composite image, 3 photos: 50mm, f/22, ISO 100, exposures of 1/25, 1/6, and 1/2 second for the three layers.
Aurora Borealis — Sept. 18, 2023
There were some northern lights again last night. They were pretty intense; not quite as bright as the shows back in March, but nothing to sneeze at either.
I took both my cameras to my favourite spot and snapped photos for about an hour. (No kidding; all the photos below were taken between 10:14pm and 11:16pm.) Out of just over 1000 photos, I present my 27 favourites.
All the photos were 5‑second exposures, f/2.8, ISO 3200, at either 11mm or 24mm.
Here’s a quick peek behind the curtain: compare the unedited photo to the version I’ve uploaded.
Milky Way — Sept. 16, 2023
Last night the sky was clear, so I went south with my cameras. I got some good photos of the Milky Way just off of Highway 2.
There was a haze to the north, too, so I aimed one of the cameras that way. It wasn’t a terribly great show—not while I was out—but I did sneak a quick shot of the aurora and the PLeaides.
On my way home, the aurora picked up a bit, so I detoured onto a dark side road for a few more minutes. I think I missed the best part of the show, but I did get to drive into a foggy valley and back out again, so at least there’s that.
It was a pretty decent evening, and I was home not long after midnight.
(Header image: 12-image panorama of the Milky Way; each image is 11mm, 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.)
Writing Retreat 2023: Friday
Well. I didn’t really keep up with posting about my retreat, did I now.
I was at the cabin for a week, Friday to Friday, with a couple days off in Winnipeg for my mom’s birthday. The weather was generally pretty grey, though it warmed up on Thursday enough for me to take my one and only kayak ride. (It was lovely, but windy, so the lake was a bit choppy.)
Thursday night, finally, the sky was mostly clear. There was a thunderstorm far, far off to the north; I could see the flashes, but I couldn’t hear the thunder at all.
I also snapped photos of Jupiter and all four Galilean moons, and Saturn (I think I even caught a bit of the ring).
