The Rose Garden

Four times a year our astronomy club has a small party instead of a regular meeting at the Vanderbilt Planetarium where we meet.  During regular meetings, time is tight and there is not much time for members to talk and visit with each other in the brief time before and after the meeting.  Anyhow, it was a warm evening on this night and some of us came out to the garden with our snacks, and I while out there I decided to do a photograph or two in the twilight.  This is called the Rose Garden and it is a small and intimate garden, with this fountain, statue, and the columns in the background.  A lovely place to just quietly walk around and take everything in as night comes on.

 

Wisps of Cloud

When I did that photograph last week which I titled "Sunset over the Sound," after I got that photograph, I started looking closely at the clouds as they changed.  I was using a really long telephoto lens that zoomed from 200mm to 600mm.  I zoomed out all the way when I saw these wisps of clouds in the sky, lit by the setting sun.  Normally I don't photograph individual clouds up close but I had the ability to do that, so this is the result.  Lovely pastel colors.

 

The World in a Brick

I decided it was time to power wash the patio.  I need to do that about twice a year because moss and lichen grow on the bricks.  So I was blasting away with the water on the bricks, making them look like new.  Until I came to this brick.  It was so thick with lichen that it stood out from all the rest of the bricks.  So I cleaned all around it and left this one.  To me it seemed a bit like a landscape or some world that was different.  It is rich in color and design, I thought.

So here is what the patio and walkways look like now.  And if you look carefully, you can find the single green brick in amongst all these others!

 

Observing the Moon

We had the first "Moonwatch" this year at Old Westbury Gardens and it was good to be back at this venue.  As a club we have been coming here and showing people and families and children the Moon through our telescopes for about 15 years now.  It is so nice to hear the comments from people who get to see the Moon for the first time through a telescope - it is an amazing sight, and everyone is always so thankful.  It makes for such a lovely evening.

The Moon is so bright that we can start observing while the sky is still light.  Of course the Moon will be so much more impressive once the sky is completely dark.  The rugged surface of the moon is such a surprise to everyone because it looks smooth to the naked eye, but the telescope shows a barren and rocky landscape, with craters and jagged mountains everywhere.

 

Mmmmm... Yum!

So here is where some of you will write me off as "being off the main sequence."  That's an astronomical term for stars that are not "normal."  Yeah, well, I guess that's me!  Why would you think that of me?  Well, because I roast my own coffee beans.  Because there is nothing like fresh roasted coffee beans!  When the weather is below 65 degrees, my coffee roaster will not get hot enough to roast the beans fully, so I have to buy roasted beans. I buy whole beans and then grind enough for one cup at a time.   Yup, I am a "coffee brat."  But you only get an excellent cup of coffee when you come to this house!

Here is a close-up of freshly roasted beans.  I never noticed this before, but see the holes in the shiny outer layer of the beans?  That's because heat makes the moisture in the green beans cause parts of the bean to explode when exposed to the 450 degrees or so temperature that it takes to roast them.  They are roasted with hot air, in my coffee bean roaster.  There is a time during the roast where you can hear the beans cracking and that is called the "first crack" and then if you wait longer you will hear a fainter "second crack" and for me they are done at that point.

This is funny, I did the other two photographs of the roasted beans earlier in the day, and when I sat down to do this post, realized that most people have never seen "green" un-roasted coffee beans.  Here they are.  They are about 3/4 the size of the roasted beans - considerably smaller before they are roasted.  And for what it's worth, when the beans are roasting they do not smell anything like coffee.  They do not smell good.  Maybe more like burning rope or something!  But it is a process well worth doing, if you are a coffee brat!  Come to my house some time and you will see!

 

The Magic of Flight, The Beauty of Earth

I usually fly out of Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, but for the next few weeks, because of construction work and repaving, I will be flying out of Brookhaven Airport. So instead of flying over the north shore of Long Island, we were flying over the south shore and out over the Atlantic ocean for some air work.  When I saw these islands and sandbars in Moriches Bay I asked my instructor to take over the airplane because I just HAD to photograph this!  By now he understands this with me!  Moriches Bay is relatively shallow and as the tides enter and leave Moriches Inlet, just outside the left side of the photograph, the flow of the water creates and changes the islands in the center of this photograph, and the sandbars just underwater, which surround them.  Just one more of the beautiful things on this Earth.

 

Cameras in the Garbage

This is so painful for me!  While cleaning out the darkroom, which had become a storage area, I came across some old cameras that have been sitting in there for years.  What you are seeing is a Nikon FE and then a Pentax K1 and two other lenses for it, and a Nikon L35, which are all 35mm film cameras, and a 4x5 Polaroid film holder.  It is so painful to just throw these cameras in the trash!  They are well used and worth nothing on eBay.  But they are cameras and I used them and took wonderful photographs with them and I could not bear to discard them.  But it is time.  I need to clean the darkroom out.  I just don't have room for a camera museum.  I had an interesting experience in an online forum a couple of years ago when a woman in California mentioned she wished she had a film camera because she wanted to learn how to shoot film.  I jumped in and said I had a Pentax SE which I won in a photo contest,  and if she wanted to trust me with her address, I said I would send the camera to her.  She was really thrilled and when the camera arrived she was so thankful.  And I felt so good because at least one of these old film cameras would go on living the life it was designed for.

 

Sunset Over the Sound

At this time of year, I keep my eye out for a clear day that is a bit hazy.  That means that if things go well, I might get to photograph the sun as a giant red ball setting in the west.  I took a chance today and went up to Memorial Park in Sea Cliff, which overlooks the harbor and Long Island Sound.  And I was in luck!  There were clouds on the horizon so the sun disappeared at about this point but I still got a shot I am happy with.  I really needed that sailboat in the foreground to add interest to the photograph.  Needless to say, I needed a long telephoto image to get this photograph.

 

And Another Thing...

Sorry to beat this topic of light pollution to death, but after showing you how bright the streetlight is compared to a crescent moon, as I finished shooting that photograph, I was walking back up the driveway, and saw how much light from the streetlight was illuminating my front lawn!  That is a waste of light!  The light fixture is there to illuminate the street, not lawns!  Our next door neighbor, Judy, says that the streetlight in front of her house shines in her front picture window and shines in her face when she is watching TV!  And her parents, who live on another street,  have a similar situation where the light shines in their front window and then into their bedroom!  They have taken a large piece of cardboard and put it in their front window so they can sleep at night.  All because these streetlights are not shielded.  A 3" piece of thin aluminum wrapped around the fixture would block this stray light.  Go figure..

 

New Street Light Outshines the Moon

I took the garbage down to the street the other night, and when I glanced up was surprised to see a beautiful thin crescent moon!  A thin crescent is such a beautiful thing to see because of its delicacy.  It looks like such a fragile thing.  But within seconds I was really annoyed that the brand new LED street light was so much brighter than the moon, that it interfered with my comfort in looking at the moon!  It is SO BRIGHT!  And I should not be able to see the direct light from the LED from this angle - from the side.  There should be a thin band of metal below the light, called "shielding" that should prevent the light from the LED from going way out to the side.  The light needs to be concentrated DOWN toward the street.  These lights are brand new and most newly installed light fixtures are "full cutoff" meaning the light does not shine up or sideways, but just down toward the street.  I am going to the village and ask if they can install a shield, which would be a piece of aluminum sheet that hangs down maybe two inches and will shield my eyes from the light source in the fixture.  I put together a talk about light pollution to deliver to a high school astronomy class earlier this year, and so I went back and found this slide that shows how to eliminate light pollution in the sky with the use of proper shielding!  This is a wonderful illustration and I forget where I found it, and I apologize for not being able to post a credit for this nicely done artwork.

 

Magnificent Cumulus!

I went over to the grocery store to get some fish for dinner.  I was driving East on Sea Cliff Avenue and I saw this scene in the distance.  So because there were so many power lines and phone lines criss-crossing the street, I kept on driving until the sky was clear of the wires.  You will be pleased to know that I stopped the car and got out and did about 20 exposures as the clouds changed in such a short time.  This was one of the first exposures.  I am always overwhelmed by the magnificence of cumulus clouds.  What I love is the subtlety of the tones in the clouds, with values going from brilliant white to faint grays and then deep grays.  Cloud are such beautiful things!  I should also add, that when I was flying to assignments in a small single-engine aircraft, on an instrument flight plan, I would fly right into clouds and then be there for much of the flight, which was a kind of magic in and of itself.  I have been inside clouds, all alone in my aircraft, and that is magic as well.

 

The Spotted Lanternfly

I have been disassembling the sink I built when I built a darkroom in the basement back in 1970.  It was built out of birch plywood and coated with epoxy.  It was large enough that I had to cut the sink into three parts to get it out of the darkroom today.  I put the parts on the front porch and will take them to the dump on Saturday.  When I came out with some other pieces, I saw this "bug" on another piece of wood that was on the porch.  I was stunned by how it looks and thought that with the red and white spots on black that it was one of the most spectacular insects I have ever seen.  I grabbed my camera with the macro lens on it, but only managed two photographs before it suddenly sprang away - I think it jumped at least six feet and then it was gone!  The Phillips head screw gives a sense of the size of this insect.  I described it to Kathy and said I have never seen this before, and she went on the web, and came back with stunning news!  This is a Spotted Lanternfly, in the nymph stage.  There was a story in Newsday the day before about how they are migrating into the area.  The invasive insect, known for its bright red wings, consumes plants and ruins them with sticky honeydew The most recent credible Long Island sightings have mostly been in Nassau County, but they are expected to increase throughout the summer as nymphs turn into more visible adults later this month, state officials said.  Grapes are especially vulnerable to the spotted lanternfly, which can swarm the vines and weaken them — taking a bite out of an industry vital to both Long Island and the state. Officials have said New York is the third-largest grape producer in the United States. The spotted lanternfly, which is native to Asia, was discovered in the United States in 2014 in Pennsylvania. Experts believe eggs likely traveled overseas in construction materials.  WOW!  So New York State says if you see one, kill it, then preserve it in alcohol and report it on the web, to the state!  So this is a really bad insect.  And I got to see it up close!

What's THIS?

WHAT is this?  Any guesses?  Any part of this look familiar?  Any idea what's going on in this photograph?  OK, if you give up, you can scroll down and check the second photograph...

These photographs, taken through the windshield of my car, while rain was pouring down, should really be titled "I AM NOT GETTING OUT OF THE CAR DURING THIS THUNDERSTORM!"  I made a quick trip over to the hardware store to pick up some lag bolts for a project, and I just knew I could get home before the thunderstorm, which I saw on the radar app on my phone, would arrive.  Guess what.  I was about 5 minutes to late pulling into the driveway, and the heavens opened!  I was not going to get soaked, so I sat in the car, and read some of my aviation checklists while I waited about 15 minutes for the storm to pass.  But I do love the first image which is abstract, that I came up with, while sitting in the car in the rain with my camera.

 

Almost Gone

I haven't been to the city in a month or two, so my first thought was, "How will the Pennsylvania Hotel look now?  Will it be down to the ground?"  Well, as you can see, there still seems to be two stories still standing.  But it is a long way from when I photographed it last August.  Look at how tall it is, it blots out the whole sky!  August 2022

Here you can see that perhaps there is only one story, as seen from the side street to the south.

There was a gate, made up of pipe and chain link fence, and I was able to put my lens right up to the space between the pipes of the gate, to show you that there is still a complete first story.  But you can't tell from this if there is a complete second story.

And of course the stunning thing is to be able to see the Empire State Building over the remaining floors which have yet to have been demolished.

 

Dinner With Friends in the City

It has been a long time since this group of friends has been together for dinner.  Unfortunately one member of the group was unable to make the dinner at the last minute.  All of these people are wonderful night sky photographers and, Stan, on the left is one of the best around.  We started getting together for dinner a couple of years ago and the hope is that we will gather 2 or 3 times a year.   But it has been months since we last ate together.  Time has just managed to slip by.  So the four of us ate in a familiar Turkish restaurant where we have eaten together before.  It was so nice to talk, and catch up and tell stories and share information.  A gathering of friends like this is good for the soul.

 

Power Line Abstraction

I was down near where the old power plant once was, and before they demolished those buildings, they had to install new high voltage power poles and power lines to bring power from across the harbor to the substation where it is distributed to Sea Cliff and Glenwood Landing and other nearby communities.  The new power poles are really tall structures - they have to be to keep the power lines well above the water of the harbor so there is no risk of sailboats or other watercraft coming in contact with these lines.  The distance between this pole on our side, and the pole the lines go to on the other side is 1,300 feet!  So the lines really bow down as they cross the water.  but I digress...  I was attracted to this view with the power pole and all the lines criss-crossing the frame.  If you think that the tones of the photograph are different looking, that's because this is a black and white infrared image.

 

Tilt-Up Construction

I have been passing this construction site for as long as I have been doing flight training.  I don't remember the early stages but what caught my eye was all the rusty supports holding up the walls.  That got my attention.  I kept meaning to stop and photograph the construction, but I never did - well, until last Wednesday after flying.  The process is called "Tilt-Up Construction."  First they come in and pour a foundation - a floor slab.  Then they put down some material like plastic and then build wooden forms on the floor slab and then they put rebar - the metal rods for support within the concrete - in the forms and then they pour concrete and fill up the forms.  These will be the walls of the building.  Then they have to let the concrete cure in order to have the proper amount of strength.  What I didn't know was how they lifted these wall slabs into place.  Well, I looked it up on YouTube and saw the whole process.  They use a crane to hoist the wall slabs into position, and then use these rusty steel braces to hold the walls in place until everything can be connected together.  What a fascinating process and apparently they save a ton of money building this way.  How it's Done

I had some fun walking around the outside of the fence that surrounds the property and looking for some interesting photographs.  The empty windows were an interesting compositional element I could play with.

The nice thing is how pretty the building is when it is finished!  As if.  This building is enormous - it is 600 feet long and 200 feet wide!  Yikes!  I will include further updates if they do something that will make the exterior prettier than this!

 

What's This Thing Doing?

This barge can be seen from the beach at the end of our street.  I am not sure when I first noticed it, but today I walked out on the beach at mid-tide and then walked north toward it and took this photograph.  In the high resolution version I can see what looks like wood pilings in a random pile on the deck of the barge.  I wonder if the machine is pulling old pilings out of the water.  I asked a friend who might know, and I will be sure and let you know if I find out.  At least it makes the "landscape" look different for a bit.

 

I Won!

I have been a member of the National Press Photographer's Association for 57 years.  I still pay my dues and belong as a retired photographer.  They sent an email as part of a fund raiser, and asked for a contribution to the organization, and any contribution was an entry in a raffle with some prizes.  So I sent them some money, and guess what?  I won one of the top prizes!  This light is worth, believe it or not, $1,000.  Wow!  I never win anything and now I have this light to experiment with!

So here's the thing.  This is some kind of lighting unit.  I think that it is a flash unit, but I haven't made it flash yet.  But it is also an LED continuous light and I was able to light that up.  So this is the unit, and the handle is the battery.  It is a solid piece of equipment.  Those three circular things up above the flash unit are different reflectors that vary the width of the light, from wide to medium to spotlight.  The charger for the battery in the handle is at the top of the photo.  And the interesting thing is that there are no wires to connect this to a camera.  You have to have a remote electronic flash transmitter to set this off apparently.  You can use one of three transmitters by other companies.  Fortunately I have one of those for another flash I own.

This is the back of the flash head, and it is where you set the intensity of the light.  You use this one knob, which you can also press in, to adjust all the settings on the unit.  I used this to adjust the brightness of the continuous light source LED on the front.  But I guess when I set up my electronic trigger to talk to this, then this will become a flash unit.  Who knows!  So stay tuned, and I will take some photographs with this unit when I figure out how to use it, and you will be the first to see those photographs.

 

Grumman Mallard!

Meet one of the classic aircraft of all time, the Grumman Mallard!  I was just finishing tying down the Cessna I had been flying in when my instructor and I saw this aircraft land and then taxi over to where we were!  What great luck!  It was headed to a maintenance hangar beyond where were parked so it went right by us!  What a thrill!  This airplane is five years younger than I am!  I was born in 1942 and this was manufactured in 1947, by the Grumman Aircraft Corporation right here on Long Island.  It is an amphibian, so it can land on water with the wheels retracted, or on land with the wheels extended. It was such a thrill to see one of these aircraft in operation! 

 

Music Under The Stars

This is my friend Yannaki.  He joined our astronomy club about a year and a half ago, and he was so excited to be among others who loved astronomy and the night sky.  Then we found out that he is a musician.  He makes electronic music with a synthesizer and other instruments. He a self-taught Latin new age guitarist and multi-instrumental artist who was exposed in his formative years to the haunting and exotic sounds of Spanish flamenco music.  Since becoming more involved in astronomy he has produced two new albums “Electronic Dreams” and “Astronomia,” which are astronomical and space themed. He performed a live program in the Vanderbilt Planetarium, called “Arrizza - Under the Stars" and so I offered to do some portraits during a rehearsal for the show.  This is one of the portraits from that session. His music is thought provoking, hopeful, mysterious, and moody, and a joy to listen to!

 

A Tale of Two Mustard Bottles

I make this post at the risk that some of you might think I have "gone around the bend."  But here goes.  A few years ago I went to the nearby grocery store where we mainly shop, and one of the things I needed to get was another bottle of Gulden's spicy brown mustard.  I looked carefully, I thought, on every shelf with mustard and couldn't find Gulden's.  So I just figured the store was out.  I mentioned it to Kathy and she said she would get it at Stop & Shop when she went there.  Sure enough, she came home with a bottle of Gulden's but it was in a BLACK bottle!  What?  When I went back to the original store, sure enough, it was there in a black bottle!  Walked right by it.  What the heck, Gulden's has been in a clear bottle since I was a kid!  Why would they change this?  It says on the black bottle "New Look."  Yeah, well, I wonder whose genius idea it was to change the bottle color?  Probably some young marketing kid who wanted Gulden's to stand out from the others which were all brown in color.  Every time I saw the black bottle, I wondered if they were selling more mustard than they used to.  I would love to know.  So, cut to a few weeks ago, and the black bottle was nearly empty, so I went to our local store looking for another bottle, and, GET THIS, I could not find it!  What???  Every single bottle of mustard on the shelf was mustard colored! Where is Gulden's?  THEN I saw it!  Gulden's in a clear bottle!  I must have passed it on the shelf half a dozen times!  They are back to the old color!  So NOW I want to know the whole story!  Did they gain market share in the black bottle, or did they lose market share?  I am guessing they sold less of their mustard and so finally switched back to the original bottle.  I would LOVE to know the whole story about this.  The Harvard Business School from time to time does examinations of business successes and failures and researches the stories in great detail, and then publishes the stories as a lesson for all, so they can learn from mistakes.  I doubt they will do a study on this one, but I would love to know all the background on this "New Look" for Gulden's and its change back.

 

I Guess I'd Better Get Going!

Before I went out on my bike ride today I checked the radar to see if there were storms around.  There was a line of thunderstorms out over western New Jersey and I judged that I could get my ride in before they hit.  So off I went.  The sky was getting darker toward the end of my ride, which is the road that runs along the harbor.  I quickly jumped off the bike and grabbed this shot with my iPhone then left right away, and  continued up my street.  The first sprinkles hit just as I got to to my driveway!  Good timing I would think!

 

Purple Coneflowers

Speaking of car inspections...  This is another photograph I took while walking to or from dropping my car off and walking back to pick it up last week.  I only know the names of about 5 varieties of flowers, and you are in luck because this is one of them.  These are Purple coneflowers, and one of my favorite flowers, and I am not exactly sure why.  I loved these since the first time I saw them at Old Westbury Gardens, back when I was doing garden photography for the paper.  These were growing in a garden along the sidewalk, so I stopped and photographed them.

 

Street Map

I saw this the other day and it stopped me in my tracks!  A map of local streets?  Well, no.  I just think it is such an interesting graphic image.  Any ideas what it might be?  I had to take my car in for a NYS inspection and so after dropping it off a couple of miles away, I decided to walk home for the exercise.  I saw two men on ladders working on the side of a building with some kind of electric chipping tool.  I didn't give it another thought, until several hours later when I walked back to pick up the car.  Then I realized what they were doing when I saw this.  It is a concrete block wall, and the workmen were chipping out mortar in cracks between the joints.  And then they used most likely some epoxy and concrete mixture to seal the cracks they had opened up with their tools!  So to me it looked a bit like a street map.  But it's an interesting pattern that may even have some flavor of a Native American design.

 

Strange Fireworks

The fireworks were different this year on July 4th.  They started shooting them off earlier than normal, when there was still light in the sky from sunset.  We didn't think much about it until a short while after it started, and suddenly all the black smoke from the explosions, made this giant black cloud against the fading light of day!  If the sky had been black, we wouldn't have seen the smoke, and if there was some light on the smoke cloud  from the front, the smoke cloud would have been white.  The black cloud sure was omninous looking!  It looked like perhaps a boat had exploded and burned!

But then as more mortars were fired, the colors of the fireworks were really pretty and the dark cloud became less obvious, and the display seemed much more normal.  It was a wonderful evening with friends watching the fireworks over the harbor.

 

The Cloud Over The Tree

After I did the self-timer exposures of Kathy and I having coffee, I had the camera near my chair because I was too lazy to take it back to the car.  Then I happened to look up at that tree that is nearly on the end of the point, and noticed the little bright cloud above the tree!  Actually, it is the top of a cumulus build-up poking up above a different cloud between that build-up and me.  There was just something that made me think that this would make an interesting photograph.  So here you are!

 

Birthday Breakfast

So today may be my birthday, but it is a Tuesday!  And you know what happens on Tuesday, right?  Right!  Dunkin' Donuts at the beach!  It was warm enough that we brought some sand chairs and a tiny white table one foot tall, to hold our coffee and donuts off of the sand, and so we sat and went through our Tuesday ritual, and really enjoyed ourselves!  It was a lovely way to start my birthday!

 

I Am So Thankful...

I am so thankful!  A month or so ago I was part of a Zoom meeting that had to do with early Moon maps presented by a member of the Antique Telescope Society, who lives in Vermont.  He was having some difficulty at first setting up his Zoom connection and he apologized for his difficulties by saying, "I am having troubles adapting to this new technology since I am an octogenarian." And that hit me like a brick!  I am an octogenarian!  And have been one for a year now!  That word made me feel really old when I only feel as if I am perhaps 60 years old, or so.  I am thankful for my health that allows me to hammer out a ten mile ride 3 or 4 days a week. And I have friends who have been friends all my life and I have younger friends who are so much smarter than I am, but who inspire me.  I have a wonderful wife who is so loving and so talented and a wonderful family with two astounding daughters and their partners and an amazing 3 year-old granddaughter, and three lovely sisters, and Kathy's brother and his wife and nieces and nephews as well.  I have so many interesting things to do involving photography, of course and then astronomy and now flying a plane again.  Life at this late stage is filled with riches beyond imagining. Who could ask for more?

 

The Masks Are Finished!

 

So this is Kathy's finished Mask!  Just beautiful, isn't it!  Kathy spent parts of three days painting it.  She wears it well, don't you think?

This is Liz and Kathy putting on another layer of the white material, on top of the blue shop towels that you saw in the photographs yesterday.  The white coating is made up of Elmer's glue and plaster of paris and water and a bit of vinegar.  There were several coats of that coating, and then after that dries, which takes a few days, then the wolves heads were painted.

What is funny is that Kathy brought her cardboard wolf's head with her on the airplane in a plastic bag!  It got through the X-Ray machine without anyone asking.  And she had to take it back through security to get it home in one piece. Once she was home, she started painting it.

The Wolf Mask Grows

 

It was fun for Kathy to get to California and work on her Wolf mask with Liz.  Kathy loves craft projects but they are even more fun when done with someone else.  When we went to Rochester the last time Kathy and Jo Anne worked on dolls, down in the finished basement sewing together.  Here Kathy and Liz are set up on the dining room table.

This is the second stage of the process, where they are using "shop towels" which are heavier and are blue colored, along with a paste made from Elmer's glue and I believe some plaster of paris mixed in.  So the paste is applied by brush and then the towel is applied and another coat of paste over it.

You can begin to see the wolf's outline better now that it is nearly completely covered in blue towel paper.

Here they are working together on each of their wolf heads.

And at the end of the day, here are both wolf heads, further along in the construction process.  Stay tuned.