Yesterday was my birthday, and the sky was clear and the aurora data were pretty good. So about 10pm I hit the road, and got these photos about 15 minutes from my house.
Above: an 11-photo panorama stretching from west to east.
The stars were sharp and clear, too, in the cold air, so I snapped some photos of one of my favourite constellations, Orion.
And because my cameras were nice and still for most of the time, I have a minute or so of timelapse video for you. Each second of video is a minute of real time.
The waning gibbous moon looked pretty, so I snapped some quick photos of it this morning while my toast was toasting.
And then, while I was working, I noticed that the trees all had a thin layer of frost on them that stood out nicely against the blue sky, so I once again grabbed my camera.
This working from home thing, man, it’s pretty sweet.
My birthday’s fast approaching, and so Facebook, as is their wont, has tried to convince me to set up a fundraiser on their platform. I’m not interested in helping Facebook out with their reputation, though, so instead I’m going to do it here on my own, much smaller platform.
If you’d like to do something good for my birthday, please donate to a charity of your choice. Any charity will do. If you can’t think of one, I’m fond of these:
The aurora data were good last night, but I’d had a long day so I didn’t go out in the countryside last night. I did set up a camera in the spare room, in case it got bright enough to be seen over the city lights. At worst, I thought, I’d get a few hours’ worth of star trails.
Oh, and the star trails turned out OK, too.
I set up the camera around midnight; the battery finally died around 4:35am. The trails above are made from about 2,200 frames, each 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 800.
David Lynch has left us. He made some amazing movies, some of which we showed at the Evans Theatre.
I remember showing Mulholland Dr. back in ’01. In that era we were showing two films a weekend: one would play on Friday at 7:00pm and Saturday at 9:30pm, and the other would be Saturday and Sunday at 7:00pm. I watched most of Mulholland Dr. on the Saturday early show, and had to leave before the end of the movie to set up for the second show (I was the late-show projectionist that night).
It was a surreal movie, with a lot of disparate things going on, but by about 8:45pm, when I had to exit the theatre, I felt like I had a handle on what was going on, and how things were going to tie together in the end. I knew I’d be able to watch the whole thing on Sunday night, and test my theories.
(For those who have seen the movie, I left right around the time Betty and Rita found the blue box.)
Well, Sunday night I settled in and watched the movie start to finish, and, uh…
Long story short, I had no idea. Shortly after I’d left the theatre on Saturday, everything changed. I still am not convinced I understand what was going on, despite having read many an article with titles like “What’s really going on in Mulholland Dr.” But what a ride it was.
Farewell, Mr. Lynch. We will not soon see your like again.
I heard a loud airplane engine, and I had my camera nearby. I stepped out on the deck and snapped a few photos as a C‑130[1]Well, CC-130, since this is Canada, eh. Hercules went ambling by.
