And Another Sign...

And another sign of Spring!  This is a Rhododendron in the garden next to the house.  I love the blast of color and was wondering how to make an interesting photograph of the blossoms.  I decided to use my zoom lens at its max, which is 200 mm.  What that does is have a very shallow depth of field so that only the two blossoms in the foreground are sharp and the background ones are really blurred.  I love this photograph a lot.  It is kind of abstract, but then again it is not.

 

Signs of Spring

I am seeing signs of Spring everywhere now, and it is so much fun to have so many things around that I can shoot.  All kinds of things springing out of the ground, so to speak!  These are some Hostas and I had fun trying to come up with an interesting composition where there was a cluster of these tubular leaves. I thought this looked interesting.

 

One-Hundred Feet Away

When I got out of the car, there was orange light on everything at the Vanderbilt Museum.  I took out my toy camera and started shooting, but I needed to get to the meeting and get set up.  So I only took two different scenes.  This one was the first, with the orange light on the tree, and the illuminated lamp in the foreground.  I thought this might be pretty good as a photograph.  Then I walked 100 feet and saw the illuminated smokestacks, which I shot.  But I like this so much more.

 

The Northport Power Station

I arrived at the Vanderbilt Planetarium for my astronomy meeting tonight and saw this scene from the garden there with the beautiful light of the setting sun and the background of dark clouds.  These are the smokestacks of the Northport Power Station.  It is the largest power generation facility on Long Island and consists of four steam turbine units which generate about 29% of all locally generated power on Long Island.  The four enormous smoke stacks are a defining landmark of Northport and can be seen from up to 36 miles away atop East Rock in New Haven, Connecticut, across Long Island Sound.  At 620 ft. they are among the tallest structures on Long Island.

 

Strange Light

I am doing a talk next month to a group of students in a High School astronomy class.  One of the topics is "light trespass" when lights from a neighbor shine in your windows.  Last night I turned out all the lights to go upstairs and I noticed the light from a neighbor's spotlight shining into the living room.  When I went upstairs to the front bedroom,  the same spotlight from a house two streets away was shining into that bedroom.  So I decided to do some long exposure photographs, essentially in the dark.  This photo is interesting because my shadow is cast on the curtains as I stood behind the camera to take this photograph.  Very strange light indeed.

 

What a Difference 4 Days Makes

                           

Four days ago I photographed this tree and showed you that only the part of the tree had buds on it, on the south side.  This is four days later and look how filled out the tree is.  I can't believe how much more foliage there is on the tree in such a short time.  You can scroll down and compare how the trees.  Mother nature is amazing!

Dana's New Camera

This is an amazing story!  Several weeks ago this young woman Dana came to the door collecting signatures for a woman running in the primary for Congress.  We started talking and I don't remember how the conversation went exactly, but she said that she was doing photography.  And she was using an older medium format roll film camera, a Pentax 6 x 7.  I said "I have one of those and several lenses!"  I had considered trying to sell everything on eBay, but the equipment was not worth a lot, and not worth the trouble for me.  So I said that she could have the camera and lenses, and I would love knowing that they had all found a good home and would be used again!  So today Dana came by to pick up the camera and lenses, and she looks happy!  A great outcome for both of us!

 

The Brick

I was rebuilding a little corner brick garden today.  I think I built this garden about 20 years ago.  The bricks are just stacked one on top of another with no mortar in the joints.  That works OK for about 5 years, but after then roots have grown in between the joints and moved the bricks and they are are tilted not stable anymore.  So every 5 years I have to take down the top 2 or three courses of bricks out, cut the roots and put the little wall back together.  So I need to cut some bricks to make them fit at the edges - I use a heavy chisel called a "Brick Set" and you hit it with a sledge hammer, and break the end of the brick off to make it the right size.  And this is what some of the really old bricks look like inside.  I am interested in the subtle change of color.  I wonder if this is because when the bricks were fired in a kiln, that the heat on the outside was greater than on the inside, thus the difference in color.

 

The Japanese Maple in Spring

I think I was bringing the garbage pail up from the street when I noticed that part of the Japanese maple had buds that had opened.  But this is interesting - only the buds on the south side of the tree had been warmed enough by the sun to open.  The buds on this side of the tree, which is the north side, were in the shade and hadn't opened yet.  Thats why you can see foliage on the tree and still see the bare branches on the north side.  Such an interesting phenomena which I have never noticed before.

 

The New House

There is an upscale neighborhood that I ride through every time I ride my bike.  What is interesting about this place, is that in the last ten years or so I have seen at least eight smaller houses completely torn down and then replaced with much larger modern houses.  This is one of those houses.  It has been about a year I think since the demolition started.  I think this is a nice house, although I think the color is a bit garish, for my taste.  The other thing is, I wish there were windows in this house.  I wouldn't like to live here without windows.  Actually, this yellow material is a vapor barrier that they put on the wood, and then the siding of the house is put over that.  There are openings under the vapor barrier, and they will cut away the barrier when they install the windows.

 

Perigean Tides

Please click on this picture to see it full size.  We were a day late going to the beach for our coffee and donut this week.  I was stunned to look out at the harbor and see a sandbar that was exposed, with birds sitting on it.  I have never seen a tide this low before!   The sandbar was about a third of the way across the harbor.  The distance across the water here is just about half a mile and the darker water in the distance is where the marked channel is.  When the tide is in, it looks as if you can sail anywhere, but you can't and I have seen large sailboats and powerboats tipped  to one side because they ran aground and then tide then went out.  Follow the buoys, captain!  This is pretty subtle to discern, but I hope you can see that the wet sandbar has no water on it.  NOAA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration explains it this way, and they PREDICTED this low water:  “When you may experience higher and lower than normal tides between March and May 2022. Dates:  April 18-20. Why will they be higher or lower than normal? In May, a perigean spring tide will be occurring. This is when the moon is either new or full and closest to earth. Higher than normal high tides and lower than normal low tides will occur. Tides will increase leading up to and after the June 21 summer solstice, due to the position of the sun relative to the earth's equator.” So there you have it, right from the horse's mouth!

 

Gathering Information

                             

Kathy had to go over to the hospital today to go through the pre-op process for surgery on her foot in May.  I had to sit in the waiting room for an hour while she went through the process.  While sitting reading I noticed these two people with their masks on and using their phones.  What grabbed my attention was that they were almost mirror imaged of each other as they used their phones!  I only took two photographs because I didn't want to be discovered photographing them.

Selfie

This is our niece Jenny doing a selfie with her nephew Grayson and her niece Evelyn at the table after Easter dinner.  Jenny's brother Jon is Grayson and Evelyn's dad.  And Jenny and Jon's wife Lauren are like sisters.  Grayson and Evelyn are twins, by the way, and they are both cuter than buttons! It is fun to see how smart both Evelyn and Grayson are!

 

Glacial Erratic

We had gone out to breakfast this morning and on the way back to Neil's house, he said "Do you want to see something really ancient?"  "You bet I do" I said.  So we drove for about 10 minutes and ended up here!  This huge boulder was deposited here by the glacier at the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago.  It is known as a "glacial erratic."  An "erratic" is a boulder found in a place other than its original parent rock's location.  That means it is not sitting where it was formed.  This Wallingford, Connecticut landmark is one of the largest glacial erratics in the state.  It was moved to this place by a glacier, and it is believed to have traveled from Meriden Mountain, about 6 miles away.

It is a magnificent thing to see and examine.  This photograph gives you a better sense of size than the first photograph, above.  It is a huge chunk of rock, right by the side of the road.  There is a wonderfully informative plaque on the site that gives more details, such as "Lava erupted about 200 million years ago across the Connecticut landscape forming "traprock" layers."  What a fascinating thing to see on a visit to my home state.

 

Family Gathering

We drove up to Connecticut today, to see Neil and Tracy and Maureen.  After spending the afternoon sitting around and catching up, we went to a sports bar for dinner where Keera, Connor, and Bob joined us.  We haven't seen Neil and our nieces an quite a while so it was so nice hanging out with all of them!  A good day in Connecticut!

 

Sunlight on the Closet

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on my socks and I happened to see this scene - the sunlight shining through the window and the curtain and leaving a shadow on the closet door.  I am not sure what drew me to this, but I thought the play of light and shadow on the door is what captured my interest.  And then all the angles made the composition interesting as well.  What do you think?

 

Bright and Sunny

I was driving back into town on Sea Cliff Avenue when I saw these flowers in the bright sunshine.  I looked at them as I approached the house and thought "those flowers make me feel bright and sunny."  So I looked at them some more as I passed and kept going, and thought they brightened my day and maybe I should stop the car and take a photograph.  WAIT!  So the scene finally registered in my brain and I stopped the car.  Finally!  Duh!  So I hope these flowers brighten your day as well.

 

Absolute Madness!

I have been asked to give a talk at a high school in a nearby town, about Light Pollution.  This is a definition of the issue:  "Light pollution is the presence of unwanted, inappropriate, or excessive artificial lighting."  This affects me as an amateur astronomer because the excess light reflects up into the night sky, turning a black sky into a medium gray, and thus all the faint galaxies and nebulae are completely obscured by the veil of light.  In addition to astronomical light pollution it is also about the loss of the night itself.  As humans the night is wired into our DNA.  We need the night for so many reasons. I am slowly putting the talk together, and so I have been looking for examples on light pollution in my neighborhood.  This is absolutely the worst!  At 11 PM the house is completely dark, but the whole section of the neighborhood is illuminated like daylight!

Here is another view.  What is the purpose of wasting all this electricity and lighting up a section of a neighborhood?  I am so angry about the people who did this.  They are certainly taking away the night of their neighbors.  If you look to the far right in the center of the photo, you can see what the street should look like.  In some communities there are laws against "Light Trespass" which involves light that spills off one property to the property of others.  This has to be the worst case here in Sea Cliff.

 

Fun At The Beach

While we were sitting at the beach having coffee in the car, a huge dump truck drove by us and then backed out onto the beach at the end of the parking lot, and dumped a load of sand.  Hmmmmm...  It drove away, and the second it was gone another arrived!  Same thing happened when it left.  I couldn't imagine the idea of a huge line of trucks arriving from somewhere with so much sand.  And then Kathy noticed a truck at the other end of the parking lot backing up.  It turns out that there were only two trucks getting sand maybe 500 feet away, at the other end of the beach!

So we drove down to the far end of the beach and saw this bulldozer pushing sand from the beach into this huge pile, which the front end loader was scooping up.  The Loader would back up, turn left and drive over to a truck out of sight to the left.  It was able to fill each truck with about three scoops of its bucket.  It was astounding to watch this ballet, and to see how quickly huge amounts of sand were moved to the north end of the beach.  Obviously the sand on the beach at the north end is slowly moved south by the currents, perhaps just during the winter, and that's why it needs to be replaced.  A fun day at the beach, watching other people work!

So this is cool!  After I posted the blog with the first two photographs I decided to check Google Earth and see what the beach looks like and why they might be moving the sand from south to north.  Wow!  Look how thin the beach is on the upper part of the photo and how much sand there is on the south end!  Question answered.  Thank you Google Maps!

 

Oh That Cat!

I am beginning to think this should be called "Cat Week."  I found this photograph I did a while ago and thought I should post it today.  So we give the cats a treat every once in a while, of dry food which they love.  So this is a plastic container that holds the dry food.  When the container is empty, we sit it by the cellar door and take it downstairs to put more dry food in it.  We heard a noise in the kitchen and so I went in to see what caused it.  There was Sam with his head in the plastic container.  There was no food in it, but he obviously smelled the food and so he stuck his head inside.  When I saw this I had to laugh out loud, because it looks so silly.

 

Rundown

I was driving south on Glen Cove Avenue, which is the dividing line between Sea Cliff on one side and Glen Cove on the other.  It is a main road with all kinds of nice stores along it, like a CVS and Starbucks, and 7-11, and our favorite grocery store.  On this day what caught me was the light illuminating this building with two empty stores in it.  I used to buy wine in the liquor store, and I don't know why they moved away.  I really can't remember what the other store looked like when it was open.  But to see this building now that looks almost derelict was such a shock.  It must have been the light.  So I parked my car and did several different views.  This was the view that stopped me at first.

But in editing, I felt that the original view did not give enough of a sense of how derelict these stores looked.  I had shot this view, of course, because that's what I do - I try a number of different angles and then see which feels right, or which communicates better the sense of what I felt when I took the photograph.  So that's why I am including this photograph.  It doesn't seem as artistic but it does a better job of showing what I felt when I really looked that this building carefully, on this day.

 

Hysterical!

Is this cat hysterical or what!  Sam can be so beautiful and so cute, but for some reason, I never seem to photograph him anywhere near as much as I photograph Grace.  But I went in to the back room today and he was cleaning himself on the couch which is the same color that he his.  His paw is bent funny, and when I came in the room he looked at me like this, and so I had to take his photograph.  By the time I got my toy camera off my belt, there was time for one photograph, and then he looked away.  But I got it!  Please click on this photo, it is so funny when you see it in a larger size!

 

The Vessel

This is The Vessel, a visitor attraction built in Hudson Yards.  The elaborate honeycomb-like structure rises 16 stories and consists of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to climb.  It opened to the public on March 2019. On February 2020 a 19-year old man jumped from the sixth floor of the structure and died. On December 2020 a 24-year old woman jumped from the top of the structure and also died. On January 2021 a 21-year old man jumped from the Vessel.  It was temporarily closed.  It reopened in May 2021, and all visitors had to be accompanied by at least one other person.  In July a 14-year old boy jumped to his death while with his family.  The Vessel has been closed indefinitely.  What a tragedy having to do with the power of suggestion that a really interesting structure suddenly becomes a vehicle for suicides.  Sorry for such a depressing post but the tragedy of all of this really affects me.

 

"Mr Satan"

I went up to the grocery store in Glen Cove, and on the way back home, I discovered I was behind this car.  It was not a normal looking car at all.  Looks home made, and of course it is from California, so that wouldn't be surprising.  But the license plate!  Are you kidding me?  "Mr. Satan."  Who wants to be known as that?  I mean, how about "Mr. Nice?"  Or anything else!  I am not sure what this driver is trying to tell people - that he is really bad, and that you better avoid him?  What a way to go through life.  I was not able to get a look at the driver after I took this photograph.  I was curious what he looked like though.

 

Spring Touch Up for the Ghost Bike

When I took my walk the other day I was stopped in my tracks when I passed the ghost bike!  It was freshly painted, and all the weeds around it had been trimmed.  This is such an interesting story.  A ghost bike is usually left where someone dies in a bike accident.  Not so in this case.  A young man crashed into a utility pole at high speed one night and killed himself.  I believe his girl friend survived but I am not sure.  The ghost bike has been here for a number of years, and a few years ago I came across the friend of the dead guy, who was cleaning up around the bike and planting flowers.  I have been so impressed with the dedication of the dead man's friend at keeping this memorial in place, and fresh flowers every spring.  But the thing I remember about the story of this crash was that the young man who died had been indicted for a murder and was awaiting trial.  Whew!

 

Why Is She Looking At Me Like that?

I have to admit that Grace has this look.  And it is always at me.  If she is in the kitchen and it is time for the cats to get their food, Sam wanders around back and forth, but Grace sits just like this and stares at me.  I cannot resist, and so I feed her.  But here she is in the living room.  I was sitting in my easy chair and she came over and sat down and started staring at me.  Who would refuse this cat, who looks at you like this.  What does she want?  In the past, I had a small red laser pointer. and when I was in my chair, I would turn it on and sweep the laser between the front hall and the living room and the dining room, and the cats would chase the dot.  But I have misplaced the laser so her looking, I am sorry to say, is in vain.

 

Pickup Sticks

Our new neighbors are hard at work on their lawn and garden in their new house.  He has done that magnificent craft work which I have showed you, where he built small fences on the front bank to check erosion.  So we talked about trimming the hedge between our houses.  When they moved in, the hedge had grown to at least 10 feet tall.  It was a tall green wall that we couldn't see through.  So he talked to his brother who is a gardener and he said the hedge should be cut really low and then allowed to grow back.  That would result in a brand new, thick hedge over time.   What is wonderful is it brightens everything  around this side of the house, and we can see the sky.  It just opens everything up and it is such a great improvement from the tall hedge.  I am so glad that our neighbor decided to do this!  I decided that the sticks would be more obvious if the photograph was in black and white.

 

Custer Institute and Observatory

I have been a member of Custer Institute since 1989 when members of my astronomy club said it was the best place for dark skies for observing.  Usually I drive out on a weekday night and set up my telescope in the side yard and observe.  Once in a while there might be others with telescopes, but not usually.  Saturday nights at Custer is when they allow the public to come up to the dome where the volunteers show them sights in the night sky.  It is usually mobbed!

Custer began as an astronomy club back when Charles W. Elmer, one of the founders of Perkin-Elmer Optical Company would get together with like minded friends, at his home.  They bought the land where the buildings are located now and built the main building in 1938.  Custer Institute was incorporated in 1942, the year I was born!  In 1945 the second building was built, which housed this room which can hold 100 people and the facility began holding both astronomy and cultural presentations for the public.  

The three story tower and observatory was built in 1947, which resulted in three round rooms inside the tower.  This is the ground floor room with displays of astronomical telescopes and equipment, and the portrait is that of Charles W. Elmer.

And this is one of the pieces of equipment on display in a case on the first floor - it is a nautical sextant from 1850, used by ship's navigators in order to navigate by the stars while at sea.

The second floor round room is where a very cozy library is located and the room is stuffed with both books and astronomy magazines going way back.  It looks like such a cozy place to choose a book and sit down to read.

This is the third floor, where a modern refracting telescope is located, and where visitors get to see so many of the wonderful things in the night sky, from the Moon, to planets, to star clusters and galaxies and gaseous nebulae.  Custer Institute is an amazing place with such a wonderful history!

 

A Day Visiting Observatories

I drove an hour out to Riverhead this morning, for a small gathering of Antique Telescope Society members.  We toured two observatories and a machine shop from the 1940's.  For telescope geeks this was a virtual heaven!  This is a photograph of an observatory at Riverhead High School, that contains a one-of-a-kind telescope built by a Riverhead machinist many years ago.  It was beautifully designed and still works

This is the telescope inside the observatory, on its equatorial mount.  The Tube of the telescope is made from aluminum and magnesium which was really unusual fort the time.  Then we were off to see an old machine shop that is a museum and contains heavy machinery from the 1930's and 1940's.

Then after lunch we headed out to Custer Institute in Southhold where I have been a member for 30 years.  This is where I drive to in order to do my observing under skies darker than any other place on Long Island.  This is another portrait of both ATS members, and Custer members who were there this evening.

 

A Pink Flamingo

One last photograph from the trip to Manhattan where I walked the High Line again.  This pink flamingo really stood out in the sunlight against the brick wall in shadow.  I am sure the people who lived there put it out just for passers by, which is kind of fun.