The Morning After

"The Morning After" is a funny name for this photograph, but it is definitely appropriate!  At the Bed & Breakfast where I stay, there are a whole bunch of other amateur astronomers who stay there as well.  When it is time for observing, I stay up on the hill at Stellafane.  But a few of them stay down here at the inn because the owner keeps a large area of grass mowed short so they can set up their telescopes right here, and after they are done, they cover them with waterproof fabric to keep them from getting wet from dew.  I have to unload my telescope, carry is some distance, set it up, and when I am done I carry it back down to my car and then drive back to the B&B.  Anyhow when they are done, they just leave the scopes where they are and go inside and sleep!  So here are two scopes in the morning after being out all night after an observing session.  I got to spend some time looking through the black shrouded telescope to the left and the views were fantastic.

 

A Stellafane Tribute

One of the greats of amateur astronomy passed away last October.  Al Nagler who started his business, Televue, years ago and who made great advances in telescope eyepiece technology has been attending the Stellafane Convention for years and years.  He won prizes for telescope design.  He made his first telescope when he was a high school student in the Bronx.  He went on to design complex optical systems used by NASA Apollo astronauts to train for lunar landings, among other things.  He loved Stellafane and was here every year I was here, and I have been coming to Stellafane for 37 years.  He was so generous - in order to raise money for Stellafane they have a raffle on the last night of the convention.  Al would donate literally, bags of expensive telescope eyepiece sets.  His son continues the tradition and he donated four bags of 5 eyepieces each, one valued at $2,500 and one at $3,500!  So they did a presentation about Al Nagler's life and accomplishments, and then they had handed out tiny little battery powered electric candles, and we all turned ours on as a tribute to his passing.  It was so moving.

 

It Took Me Long Enough!

Today I went to Mass MoCA in North Adama, Mass, which is such an amazing and wonderful art mustum.  In on of the giant galleries, there was an exhibit  that took up maybe 1/2 of the room.  Then there was a background and you had to walk around the edge and through this dark cloth tunnel to get to the second part of the exhibit.  The first time I went to walk through, there was a couple exiting the tunnel in the distance.  I grabbed my camera but I was too late, they walked out of the dark and turned right and disappeared from sight!  So I waited for another couple and no one came.  So I continued touring the whole exhibit, but I still wanted my photo.  I saw a couple who had walked through it and thought of asking them if they could go back and I would do my shot, but I was too shy or didn't want to bother them.  Later on another couple were in the last part of the exhibition and I knew they would HAVE to come back through, so I waited and they didn't come.  Then I decided to go back through and see if they were coming, and they were.  They did enter the tunnel together but one was in front of the other so it wasn't a nice silhouette!  So I screwed up my courage, and said "Can I ask a favor?" and they agreed and then walked down the tunnel, holding hands, in perfect silhouette!  I thanked them profusely, and I finally had my shot!  Not even sure why I like this so much but it has to do with the triangular opening.

 

The Heart of the Milky Way

I spent all day at the Hartness House Workshop which was a series of lectures all day long on so many different topics having to do with astronomy, observing and some talks about imaging in order to gather some scientific data for research.  It is always such a spectacular series of talks from experts in their fields.  I look forward to this talk each year.  Then there was a dinner and a keynote speaker.  By the time I got back to the farmhouse inn it was about `10PM and I was beat but against the forecast, it was perfectly and some of my fellow astronomers had telescopes set up out in a field that the proprietor mows, knowing that some will like to set up their telescopes..  I was too tired for that but decided to get my camera out and to do a few photographs, so that I would have a nice blog post.  I cannot remember the last time I saw the Milky Way.  I think it was when I was out observing at Orient Point about a year or so ago.  Such a joy to stand under a dark skies, full of stars from horizon to horizon!  This is a larger image, so please click on it to see more detail.

 

Meadow Exhibit

About 6 miles after crossing in to Vermont from Massachusetts, there is the Vermont Welcome Center.  It is a wonderful place to make a visit and take a break from driving.  I love to wander around with my camera snd try and find a blog photo.  In this photograph is is a view of the "Meadow Exhibit" which I did not know about from other visits.  There are so may wildflowers in bloom here it is so much fun to walk around and see if I can find a photo.  The dead or dying tree doesn't help here, but I could not find a photograph that did not include that tree.

 

A Stunning Musical Instrument

This is another of the musical instruments on display in the "Heavenly Bodies" exhibit, a series about unusual musical instruments, some of which represent human forms.  This instrument is a Ngombi, a harp, from Gabon.  It is from the mid-20th century.  It is a sacred harp central to the ancestor-focused spiritual practice of the Tsogo culture.  It is often crowned with a female head, it represents the voice and body of Nyingwan Merge, the Sister of God.  When the harp is infused with ancestor voices and animated by the performer’s spirit, it becomes capable of playing itself and is a direct channel for spirits to communicate with the ceremony participants.  This is so stunning to see, I started with a close up photograph of just the top of the harp.  The full length image is below.  What a stunning and beautiful object this is!

 

"Heavenly Bodies" at the Met

I have posted here about two recent exhibits I saw in Manhattan. You have seen the one about the Giacometti sculptures at the Met.  There were two other exhibits at the Met.  One of them was called "Heavenly Bodies" which included a series about unusual musical instruments.  This is a "PianoArc 360"  piano, and as you can see, it is stunning.  It is an electronic instrument because there is no where to have the "piano strings" or musical wires where the keys control the hammers that strike the strings.  I cannot imagine how this is played, but it must be something to watch.  What a cool device!

 

No More Shredded Wheat!

I was walking down the cereal aisle the other day, to get another box of Shredded Wheat Minis, which is what I have for breakfast most days.  With blueberries, of course.  I saw this brilliant flash of orange-red color on the shelf, and I stopped to see what it was.  I was stunned.  THIS is a cereal?  It looks like hundreds of tiny chocolate croissants!  THIS is healthy for children?  A chocolate breakfast cereal?  This is nuts!  Next trip I am going to see how much sugar is in this cereal, compared to, for instance. Shredded Wheat.  Or, maybe instead I will rethink this and start having this for breakfast instead of Shredded Wheat! I love chocolate!

 

The Egret in the Mill Pond

On July 7 Kathy and Amy and Vivian and I went to Cedarmere, the home of William Cullen Bryant, in Roslyn, and I did a series of six photographs there, which I posted on the blog.  There were so many things to photograph that I left a couple of photographs out of the post.  This is one of them.  It is the Mill Pond at the estate and I did a photograph of looking at the pond the long way in the first post.  This is a view across it, with an Egret carefully walking along the shoreline in the shallow water.  I love this photo because the Egret is such a small part of the photograph and yet we see it almost instantly.  I love this photographs because of the richness of all the vegetation, both in the background and along the shore and in the pond.  It is green everywhere!

 

A Different Way to See

I walk this route so many times, and I kind of know all the best views for photographs.  Which is good because if I am walking in a snowstorm or rain or fog or see orange light from sunset, I know right where to go for the best shot.  But I am always looking for "different" ways of seeing these wonderful Sycamore trees.  And I found this view the other day.  I. cannot remember how I came to this, but it is really unusual to have the tree trunk split the photograph right right down the center.  I love how there is a tree shot on the left and a sidewalk and harbor shot on the right.  It is interesting and a nice exercise in an unusual composition.

Salt Cod???

I was in line at the fish counter at our grocery store.  While I was waiting I happened to see this - I mean it is really hard to miss - seeing some hard, pure white "stuff" in a box in the fresh fish section!  It hardly looks like something to eat at all!  I could not imagine what someone could make to eat starting with this!  Dried and salted cod has been produced for over 500 years in Newfoundland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands and in Norway!  I thought it was dried and salted on the fishing boat, but it was actually dried and salted on shore, so that it could be shipped long distances and stored up to a couple of years!   So, below is an excerpt from "The Joy of Cooking" about what to do with the salt cod in order to turn it into a meal!  Coming from New England, I had heard about salt cod all my life, but I had never seen it before!  Wow, 48 hours of rinsing it to get all the salt out of it!

A Brilliant Young Man!

This is Mak, and his mom Valerie.  They first came to ASLI in January of 2025.  He was interested in astronomy and of seeing galaxies.  So he learned some things about astronomy from many of the people in the club and decided he wanted to be able to photograph faint galaxies and nebulae.  So his mom went to an astronomy store and bought him a semi-automated telescope which finds objects in the sky and then it starts taking long exposures of them.  It "stacks" one image on top of another and then another until a faint objects is captured, and you can do this for an hour or 3 hours or 6 hours, or for a number of different nights until you have a good photograph.  That's because some objects are so faint.  Then you have to use some sophisticated software to work on the photograph to make it better.  Mak did that, gathering 14 hours of exposures on something called the "Eagle Nebula."  He worked on it for days and days in an image program like Photoshop, but more complicated and only used for night sky images.  In the end he got a stunning photograph and at the urging of one of our members, he entered it in a contest called the "Youth Imaging Award" from "The Astronomical League" and he won Second Place!  This included amateur astronomers and imagers from all over the United States!  His mom asked me to present him with his plaque at the meeting tonight, which is what I did.  What an astounding compliment this was to his skill and determination and patience to create his prize winning image!  We are all so proud of him!

 

The Power Grid

I stop at a number of places on my bikeride.  I have checkpoints along the way that I stop and write down my times to see how I am performing as I ride.  The last place I stop is near the old power plant.  This time I just happened to look up toward the sun and saw all this electrical infrastructure.  I am not sure what is in here but it is definitely still in use, with lines leaving there and going up to a tower where they are connected to really high voltage lines.  I think there may be transformers behind the wall.  But I loved seeing all the high voltage wires and ceramic insulators everywhere within this framework. So this is all part of what brings electricity to our homes.

 

Vivian Lost Her First Tooth!

Today was Vivian's birthday!  She is six years old!  So we had a Facetime today with Vivian and Amy and Gus.  We knew that she had a tooth that was hanging for a day or two, and it finally came out about two days ago, and so today we see it for the first time.  How could I forget that Liz and Amy went through this, with one by one their baby teeth came out and were replaced with permanent adult teeth.  So it is fun to see this again with Vivian!

 

Rainstorm

At the beginning of last week, we had two days of good rain.  I was standing on the front porch looking out when it started raining hard for a bit, so I took my toy camera and made this photograph.  I love the atmospheric effect of so much rain that it almost looks foggy as you look further into the distance.  And I like the feeling of this photograph as well, whatever that is.   Please click on this to examine it in a larger size and you can see the streaks of raindrops throughout the picture.

 

Lucia and I

It was time for a haircut today, so I called Lucia to see if she had a spot this afternoon, and fortunately she did.  Kathy and I have been coming to Lucia for haircuts I am thinking, for about 30 years plus. Kathy asked a friend who suggested Lucia and originally she had her salon in the basement of her house. I think neighbors complained about the cars parking there, so she rented a salon and we have been coming here ever since.  I love coming here for the life that goes on here. There are several hairdressers that have been with her for years, and Janet who does the shampooing,  who we have known for as as long as Lucia has been in this location.  She has a lot of Italian customers and the shop is usually full and there is so much conversation back and forth in Italian and Spanish and the shop always feels so alive with conversation.  There is always the offer of an espresso when I arrive.  So at the end of my haircut I asked if I could do a portrait of the both of us and she said "yes."  So here we are, friends after so many years.

 

Standing Woman 1, at the Getty Center

In my first post of the Giacometti sculptures at the Temple of Dendur, I mentioned how, every time  I entered this gallery at the Getty Center, I was stunned by the presence of one of his figures so striking, up against a white wall.  The other thing is, that this sculpture is nearly nine feet tall!  So you are actually looking up at it when you stand in front of it.  I thought I would take the time to show this "Standing Woman 1" in more detail so that you could appreciate how it is made.  Please click on each image to see it larger.

So this is a medium view and you can begin to see how little dabs of clay were put together to form the rough structure of this woman. When the clay figure was finished, a mold was put around it and then molten bronze was poured into the mold, to form this bronze figure.

And here is even more datail from a closer view.  So here is what is wonderful - I looked up this photo in my collection and then went to the Getty Center website to to look up the information.  Along with all that, there is a wonderful description by one of the Getty curators.  So I hope it will offer some insights if I reproduce just part of the description.

"Nearly nine feet tall, this larger-than-life, extremely slender figure towers over the viewer.  Despite her emaciated frame, she commands the surrounding space.  Her rail-thin arms appear almost fused to her torso, hightening a palpable sense of empty space around the figure.  The relatrively large base emphasizes her fragility.  The deeply kneaded, distressed bronze surface suggests a morbid, decomposing form."

OK but I find I have a problem with that.  I have never had a feeling when seeing these different Giacometti statues of woman that they were decomposing figures at all!  Never a hint of that so I disagree with the curator on this note.

 

Cloud Watching Again

We went to the beach again today, so Kathy could do some of the walking she needs to as part of her recovery.  The minute I got out of the car I saw this scene.  So many different kinds of clouds visible, both low level cumulus which you see closer to us and then higher clouds further away.  I was not sure, but at first right in the center of the photo, over the dark trees, I thought that might be a rain shower, but I don't think it is.  It was a showery day today.  After walking for a bit, I looked to the north across the sound and there was a similar rain shower as I photographed yesterday.  When we left the parking lot, there was another huge rain shower just across the harbor that obscured the whole horizon to the north.  Just beautiful gray clouds everywhere today.  And a single person down by the water, watching the clouds as we were.

 

Storm Clouds Over The Sound

We were on the way home after doing some errands and as we drove back along shore road I saw these brilliant white clouds, with the much darker gray clouds above them.  I have never seen anything like this in all the years I have lived here!  I quickly pulled over, grabbed my camera and took this photograph.  Notice the different reflections in the water, with the white clouds leaving a brighter reflection.  Notice that it is a bit more gray under the center area of the white clouds.  That gray color is either rain coming down from the clouds, or it could br "virga" which is when the rain falls from the cloud but evaporates before it hits the ground.  What a joy it was to see all these beautiful clouds!

 

Walking Woman

I was sort of familiar with the thin, rough surfaced Giacometti sculptures that were in yesterday's pictures.  What is really cool is they placed this bronze sculpture "Walking Woman" inside one of the structures of the Temple of Dendur.  In the wide angle photograph yesterday, this sculpture is inside the larger, far structure.  I would never have guessed that this sculpture was made by the same artist as all the other sculptures on display!  That shows you how little I know!  I was curious what people who know about art thought this sculpture was about.  So I looked it up!  "Alberto Giacometti's Walking Woman was created between 1932 and 1936.  It is an iconic slender sculpture that transitions from the surrealist experimentation to his signature elonged human style.  It reflects ancient Egyptian and Cycladic frontal proportions.  This figure captures the weightless balance of a living person in motion rather than a heavy physical body.  It also emphasizes rigid, timeless posture and profound psychological presence." What do you think?  I am not sure what I think.

 

Giacometti at the Temple of Dendur

                              

There is an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where 14 works in bronze and plaster by Alberto Giacometti are displayed in and around the Temple of Dendur.  It is explained that this "places the work of one of the great sculptors of the 20th century in dialogue with the ancient civilization that strongly influenced his art and his practice."  I love this shot because it shows the familiar unimaginable thin women statues against children and adults looking at the temple.

The Temple of Dendur was completed in 10 BCE as a commission by Caesar Augustus shortly after he became emperor of Rome. Gifted from Egypt to the United States in 1965, it has been one of the most beloved works of art at The Met since it opened to the public in 1978. 

It is further explained that "Throughout his career, Giacometti showed a particular fascination for the art of ancient Egypt. The Egyptian statues he saw in Italy as a young artist made a lasting impression on his visual repertoire, and after he moved to Paris, he regularly visited the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre." These statues are astounding to look at and to study.  There is a single bronze statue of a woman at the Getty on display up against a blank wall which you see when entering one of the galleries, and it always stops me in my tracks.

The Ghost Building

When I came up out of the subway I saw this building right away.  It looked like a ghost building instead of a real building.  So this building looks like this because they are doing some kind of construction on the outside.  They have set up scaffolding to work on the building, and then think they have regulations that some kind of fabric has to surround the scaffolding, I believe so that if anything was dropped, the fabric would keep it from falling out into the street.  So that's what makes it a ghost building.

 

How to Make a Cowboy Hat

I went to the city on Thursday to meet Stan and to see a huge photo exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum.  The photographer was Christopher Payne and the exhibit is called "Made in America."  His photographs of both giant factories, like at Boeing, or smaller facilities, like the Bollman Hat Company founded in 1868, in Pennsylvania are both beautiful and illuminating.  This is an exhibit showing the all the stages of how a cowboy hat is created, and there are a number of photographs on the wall in this room showing the people and the process.  But seeing a pink cowboy hat was amazing!  Who ever heard of a pink cowboy hat!  But it is something for a woman to wear when she is dressed up.

The construction starts at the lower left foreground with the wool, and then it is made into the next stage, to the right, and you can follow the procedure to the finished hat.  There are text blocks which explain each phase.  What a wonderful thing to see. And the photographs are just beautiful and astounding.

 

Waiting for the Train

I love changing trains in Jamaica.  There are  eight tracks and you get off your train, and then wait for the next train to take you to either Penn Station, or Grand Central Madison.  So I am always kind of idly looking at the passengers on the other platforms.  When I saw this woman I stopped in my tracks. I think it was the light illuminating her that caught my attention first.  There was a band of bright sunlight illuminating the platform just in front of her, and then reflecting up to illuminate her.  And then I noticed the quiet way she was standing there, moving very little.  So I took my camera out of my backpack and held it down at my side and pointed it at her blindly, and wonder of wonders, she was in the frame.  I love that is such a quiet photograph, and beautiful as well.

 

"Street Photography" in the City

I was trying to take a candid photograph of this young woman because she looked so cool, with her wonderful hair and headphones on.  I first saw her in silhouette, and her headphones were more obvious.  So I didn't look at her, but instead held my camera down by my waist and pointed the camera in her direction and took a few photos.  In most of the others she was not even in the frame!  I cannot believe I got this one!  I had seen the man but he was looking down the tracks.  So this is an accident, but, still I got this photograph in the end.  "Luck favors the very prepared."  "Street Photography" by the way is when you photograph people candidly walking down the street or on subway platforms.  It is really hard to do well.  And luck really helps.

 

A Puzzle

I was on my 2 mile walk, shortened from 2.6 miles because of the heat.  I walk by the swimming pool at Tappan Beach every time I walk, but never noticed this.  But I was walking earlier in the day and the pool was still open and this is one of the attendants I am thinking, sitting in a chair on the other side of this privacy fence. This just caught my eye and I stopped and quickly took about four frames and then looked at them on the back of the camera and figured that I got it.  I think it is unusual for me to shoot anything like this.  I called it "The Puzzle" because it looks like one, I thought.

 

Storm Warning

Today was Dunkin' day at the beach.  It was very windy and there were low gray clouds overhead. I noticed these red and green flags frantically blowing in the breeze and wondered what it might look like if I tried to take a photograph of the flags against the sky.  I really only tried one view, with a slight move from left to right to get the flags so they didn't overlap.  These are not about storm warnings at all, of course.  They are the flags posted on the beach, with one set to the right of the lifeguard tower, and an identical set to the left of the  tower, so that the swimmers know where to swim and where not to swim.  I like the photograph a lot because of the mood it establishes.

 

Flowers at Rum Point

When I was down photographing the water company workers, I wandered just a small distance down the sidewalk to look at this little park.  It is not very big, but has maybe 5 benches that people can sit on while looking out at the harbor.  I used to stop here at the end of my bike ride and cool down.  I realized recently that the park looks so much nicer!  The lawn is no longer bare and someone has made this beautiful garden of flowers.   So I spent some time looking for the best view.  I love the geese seen through an opening of the fence.  Oh, they have a sign there that says this piece of the land is called Rum Point.

 

Observing Night

This is my friend Lawrence and I out observing for the first time together.  We have been trying to get together with our telescopes for more than a year.  He found a used telescope in a shop and wanted to go out observing so that I could show him a few things about using it.  Tonight was the night and the skies looked pretty good so we went to Sunken Meadow State Park.  It turned out that there was a lot of light pollution but we saw a globular cluster and a galaxy and a triple star and a beautiful double star, with stars of different colors.  This was his first time observing and he was overwhelmed by the experience and can't wait to go observing again.  We will have to head further out east to darker skies for out next trip

 

Finishing Up the Water Main Repair

                             

Boy, this watermain damage turned out to be a big deal!  I could not believe all the trucks and heavy equipment the water company had on site to fix the damage. They had to close our street where it met Shore Road.

The big red arm on the upper right was a tank truck vacuum cleaner to pump water out of the deep hole that the excavator at left, dug.  It was at least six feet to get to where they needed to be.

Because the hole was so deep they needed to put heavy wood planks around the hole to keep the soil under the road from collapsing into the hole because a worker needed to be down at the bottom to make the repair.

We can assume the workman in the hole is almost 6 feet tall and all we can see is his helmet.

Look at all the trucks lined up on the left side of the road in this photograph.  And they needed to keep shore road open, so things were pretty crowded while the work was going on.

They worked past quitting time on the last day of their repairs, and then filling everything back in.  All you can see here is the blacktop they covered all their digging with.  If you click on this photo you can see smaller black patches on the road going back into the distance, where they had made other holes in order to repair the water main.

Maybe the Last of the Smoke?

This photograph is also from the walk yesterday when the smoke was still heavy.  I love how, in the background, you can see the trees that are furthest away from me, get lighter and lighter from all the smoke, and the closer trees are darker.  Because they are closer, I am not looking through as much smoke to see them.  Those trees, by themselves are not enough to make an interesting photo.  In this case, the long string of geese paddling by gives the photo a lot more interest.  Well, I hope it does!

 

Smoke is Still With Us

When I go to the bottom of Laurel Avenue, instead of heading south toward where the old powerplant was, I turned north and into a park that leads to a strip of beach with these kind of breakwater rocks leading out into the harbor.  It is such an interesting photograph looking out over all these rocks up to where boats are moored off Sea Cliff beach and Glen Cove Creek.  As you can see the two sailbots on the horizon like are barely visible through the smoke from the fires that is still with us.  But I think these rocks make a really interesting photograph.  If you click on the photo to enlarge it you will see many more sailboats moored to the right of these two.

 

Smoke from Canadian Wildfires

The skies and the air here on Long Island are terrible these days, because of smoke from Canadian wildfires.  This afternoon I could even smell the smoke. According to the EPA "AirNow Fire and Smoke Map this smoke is coming from Canada, where the fires are North of Wisconsin and Minnesota.This view is from Memorial Park, on the cliff overlooking Hempstead Harbor and Long Island Sound.

Here is a view from the little park down at the foot of Laurel Avenue looking over at Sands Point, partley obscured by the smoke.  

This is the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map, and you can see that where we live in the NY Metro Area we have some of the worst air conditions anywhere in the United States.  Amazing that we can be affected by something so far away from us.

 

Ancient History

I found this photograph of me, photographing a baseball game at Yankee Stadium.  I started at Newsday in November of 1966 where I shot sports, like the Yankees, and the NY Jets because of the days and hours I worked.  I think I was a general assignment photographer for 5 or 6 years, before the Sunday Magazine started and then I was the staff photographer for that from then on, until they folded the magazine, in 1990.  I cannot believe how young I was here!  And ask me if I ever saved any prints of my sports photos!  I photographed Joe Namath every Sunday home game and never saved a print!  What a dolt!

 

Behind the Greenhouse

My sister Betsey asked for more photographs from Cedarmere, so here is one more.  While wandering around the property and the gardens, I happened to walk behind the greenhouse after seeing all the formal gardens.  And this view really caught my attention.  Because it is not really an organized part of a garden, but rather random pots with flowers that kind of randomly ended up here.   I think this is a good photograph, but I am not sure.  Please let me know what you think, if you would.  Thanks!

 

The Weed

OK, this is a silly post.  It was a bit cooler today, so I decided to open some of the windows in the back room because it was cooler outside than inside!  When I went to open this window I was stunned to see the top of this weed, higher than the window opening!  "What the heck is that?  So I got my camera and went so I could look out and see more of this weed.

This thing is huge and this photo is only a small part of the top of the weed!  How long has this been growing here?  This is growing on the west side of our house, in the narrow section of lawn between our house and the hedge, which we share with our neighbor. I have not been as diligent mowing the grass on this side of the house, so that's why this weed got so tall before I saw it. 

So I told you this was a silly post, but look how tall this weed is!  I have never seen a weed like this anywhere in our yard before.  I wonder if perhaps a bird brought some seeds here in some way.  Anyhow as I write this, the weed, along with two others that are similar, is still growing out there.  I will pull them up tomorrow.