Part-time prevaricator
Hoo boy, I haven’t done one of these in a while.
Yep, I’m a mentor again. Good luck to us both.
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:
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? |
|---|
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
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.
The clouds caught my eye, so I grabbed my camera.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
Thursday morning I went for a ride and took my camera along. I went up the hill on 16A, and then raced back down it and noodled around town for a bit, mostly along the river (they’ve opened or re-opened a few pedestrian bridges, which I liked).
As I was processing the photos, I tried one of GNU IMP’s automatic features, and it was a little, uh, dramatic.
It was a fun 10km ride.
