The Out-of-Towners

I had a wonderful day yesterday.  My sisters Betsey and Joan took the train from Milford, Connecticut to spend the day in Manhattan with their brother.  The first thing they wanted to see was the High Line.  They had read about it and seen my photographs on my blog and couldn't wait to see it.  We took a few hours to walk the entire length of the High Line and stopped for lunch along the way.  Then they wanted to see the memorial plaza and the waterfall pools at the 9/11 Memorial.  It was a great day of hanging out and exploring Manhattan.

While I was waiting for Betsey and Joan to arrive at Grand Central Station, I decided to walk around looking for blog photographs.  I was focusing on the woman with the cellphone photographing the ceiling of the terminal, and was surprised to see how many others in the photograph were looking up as well.  They are looking at the spectacular ceiling, which is painted sky blue and has a number of constellations painted on it, and there are light bulbs that show the stars as well.  It is worth looking up!

Farewell to Momma Kitty...

Today has been a terrible day.  I was in the city all day.  Kathy was at home and a couple showed up to meet with her.  They came in the house and said "Oh you have cats."  "There is a white cat lying in the street."  Kathy raced out to see, fearing the worst, and it was Momma Kitty, and she was gone - she was apparently hit by a car.  She has always been a careful cat, but she did wander into other yards on the block.  We think she may have been in the yard across the street, and then the dogs in that house were let out, and she probably panicked and ran into the street.  We are sick about her loss.  She is a feral cat, of course, so we fed her but worried about her.  She got through winter OK, so we were relieved.  But we never expected this.

Momma kitty was Grace's mother.  Mom abandoned Grace and we saved her. These cute little buggers are Grace's brother and sisters.  What is also sad is that they are all gone as well.  Until about two months ago, the tiger kitty, second from right, was also coming to our house for food, but he stopped coming.  We were unable to capture and neuter the cat to the right of Tiger, and she had a litter of kittens, but they eventually disappeared. We have no idea what happened to the other one.

Here is Momma and two of her longest living kittens, eating on our front door.  She always let the kittens eat first when they all came to our door. What a terribly difficult life for all these cats.

The Geology of Mars

We had a wonderful talk tonight by a professor from Stony Brook University on the history of the geology of Mars.  She talked about the different periods of Martian geology and how those periods differed from the geological history of Earth.  On the screen behind her are detailed photographs of some Martian surface features that she described in detail.  I kid you not, this was really fascinating stuff!

Selfie...

One more photo from the astronomy convention.  They set up this background and proclaimed it a "Selfie Spot."  I can't quite figure out why someone would want this as a background.  This convention takes place in a giant field house at a college, and the really interesting background was the convention itself.  That's where I did MY selfie...   :-)  What makes this, in my mind, is the expression on his face.

No Geeks Here...

You might think that at an astronomy convention there would be a lot of geeks.  That is absolutely not the case.  Just because there are telescopes and cameras and technical discussions of exoplanets, doesn't mean that geeky people go there.  Nosireee...  Not at this convention!  I was wandering the aisles looking at everything and saw these three people posing for a portrait by one of their friends from their astronomy club.  Of course I needed to take this picture to prove my point!  See, not a geek in sight!

Dragonfly

Yesterday I drove up to the Northeast Astronomy Forum in Rockland County.  It is one of the great astronomy gatherings in the world!  There is every piece of astronomical hardware on display, and lectures all day from some of the top astronomers in the country.  This talk was about something called Dragonfly.  Two brilliant astronomer friends came up with an idea to use some off the shelf Canon telephoto lenses for a multi-lens array that functions as a telescope in order to do ultra-low surface brightness astronomy at visible wavelengths..  For you photo fans, they are 400mm f/2.8 lenses at a cost of $10,000 each.  They started with a few lenses and then built an array of 24 of these!  Now they are up to 48 lenses.  The observatory is in New Mexico and they are doing breakthrough work in astronomy with this instrument.  You can see the array of 24 lenses in the slide behind the speaker, who is Bob Abraham, of the University of Toronto one of the two principal investigators..

Bridge, Rising

This is the "New NY Bridge Project to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge."  It has been underway for a while.  It is a conventional bridge for most of its span, but there is an elevated section for ships to pass under in the center.  The section with the tall concrete  towers is called a cable-stayed span.  They have started adding some of the cables which you can see if you enlarge this photo.  This is an amazing project which costs 3.9 billion dollars.  Do you think our taxes will be going up?