Schierer Space

Reaching back a bit before my last posting, the fam drove out to visit friends in Troy for their son’s 1st birthday party. It worked out nicely, as this was the weekend K had already planned to take the kids up to Maine. We drove out separately so I could return home and save precious vacation for later ventures.

It was rather fun to see more of our college friends with kids of their own. We weren’t exactly first adopters of the whole ‘start-a-family’ thing amongst the college crowd, but we’re also far from the last. To the parents at that party, and you know who you are, I have a rather nice portrait of the birthday boy and the sweet little baby girl in the strawberry hat. I feel somewhat odd about posting your kid’ pictures to my website, so instead here are some lily’s from the garden. ^[1]

On the way home, I dodged thunderstorms which literally flanked me on both sides. It made for a slow drive, not because of the rain or wind but for the many stops I made to take pictures of the sky.

And finding spots to get lightning pictures… like this pagoda in West Winfield.

1. I’ll send them by email instead. [↩]

Since the Central New York weather has finally cooperated to produce a significant snow fall.^[1] In fact, prior to this event Baltimore, MD, was actually ahead of Syracuse for most snowfall in a US city this year. ^[2]
After piling all of the snow from the driveway next to the driveway, the temptation to carve out a fort and some tunnels was overwhelming. With Nate’s ‘help’ we constructed a pretty decent snow park with canyon-like paths, a tunnel, a fort and a slide.

Here are some highlights:

No snow park would be complete without a snow-bunny… ^[3]

More fun in the snow in Nate’s gallery.

More pics of Rachel added too.

1. We’ve been getting steady amounts which have amounted to very little significant accumulation. This was finally a storm that dumped a significant amount over a few days. [↩]
2. A population of over 100,000 if I recall the bracket. [↩]
3. Who has since melted enough that it lost its head. Apparently this was the cause of some significant distress for one of Nate’s playmates. [↩]

Optics Picture of the Day brings us this beautiful video of a circumzenithal arc that appears periodically as the high altitude clouds float by.

The thermometer has taken a dive for the cellar and what was a beautiful start to fall has pretty much skipped right to November. This morning, the frost was definitely on the pumpkins.^[1]

However, over the last few weeks we’ve been enjoying the rainbow of leaves and the autumn activities here in Central New York. ^[2]

Our pumpkins with Nate for scale.

After work today Nate and I had some fun playing in a big pile of leaves in the front yard. Honestly, this is probably the first time in 4-5 years I’ve actually raked leaves. I guess I had a good reason for once.

Also check out some of the other new pics of Nate that have been posted: Nate helping paint the nursery, Nate giving K the “No Mommy” face, etc.

1. Snow actually. [↩]
2. I admit to wondering if I’ve managed to capture the new logo for the GBLA of Canada. [↩]

K opened a can of Coke a little while ago and it was partially frozen. We keep the cases in our garage entryway. This space is enclosed between the insulated/heated part of the house and the interior wall of the garage.

I guess it’s time to move the soft drinks before they aren’t.

First, I have to shamelessly (re)link to this fantastic video that the Bad Astronomer mentioned on his blog a week or so. If you haven’t already taken the time to watch, it is truly a beautiful thing: high-speed video of a Saturn V launch set to some nice spacey environmental music.

Of course, then I started flipping along on VideoSift looking at other high-speed video… which of course is a confusing term since it results in slow-motion footage… but anyway I found this clip which is indescribably awesome.

I’ve heard that lightning bolts actually travel up from the ground after an initial smaller charge traveled down, but I’ve never seen video of this before. Of course, once I found this one, I learned that there are many other similar videos on YouTube. Lightning has always fascinated me. I think I’m going to have to rent this cabin some day.

Some of you who have visited in the last month are aware that I’ve been shooting images for an extended time lapse video. The subject was the maple tree in our front yard through the month of October. I was hoping to capture the entire transition to winter, but unfortunately the computer capturing the images had some kind of crash. By the time I noticed, several days had gone by, irrevocably breaking the chain.

So I give to you two videos which end at the climax of fall color, rather than the true start of winter as I hoped. The first is images taken 15 minutes apart and displayed at 15 frames per second (time compression of 13500x) . I removed the night shots, so each day will transition from sunrise to sunset in about 10 to 12 seconds. This video shows a rather nice demonstration of how much a tree actually moves due to wind, rain, and yes… fog.

Movie one [80.2 MB]

The second uses the same images as the first, but only the image taken at 2PM each day. The images do a sort-of cross-fade transition, so it gives the illusion that a day has passed. This video transitions each day in about 1 second, so almost a month goes by in less than 30 seconds.

Movie two [28.9 MB]

It’s that time again. Today was officially my first drive home in the snow this season. Not enough to be slippery or dangerous, just a fluffy falling reminder that fall is truly over.

[sigh]

This is rather depressing, it is made worse by the daylight savings time change, since it is now dark at 5PM. Even a reasonable departure from work puts the whole drive home in the dark of night.

[sigh]

In a continuing effort to get all of our digital images under some kind of organization (I’ve learned quite a bit in this process which I will share at some point), I have come upon a lot of lost and forgotten images and digital photography experiments. One such series of experiments, I’ve never really been able to share before because the files were simply too big for any kind of free web-space that came with a package ISP deal.
With the wondrous volumes of space now at my disposal and a bandwidth limit I’m not likely to exceed (unless I get burned by some-sort of slashdot effect), I am posting these (by 2002 standards) relatively large video products to the web for the first time. Feel free to comment what kind of download speeds you got, I’d be curious to know what kind of throughput this server actually manages.

So what are they, you may ask? And why are they cool enough that I, your dear reader, wants to burn my limited (?) download bandwidth viewing them?

These links direct to a series of avi movie files that were generated by setting my Canon G2 to fire off an image at a fixed interval. After collecting hundreds of these images onto a laptop, I compiled them into time lapse movies. We were living in Tucson, AZ, at the time, so the preferred subject were the monsoon rain clouds forming over the Catalinas.
(more…)

The words from the WRVO weatherman were something like:

“Central New York is waking up to a Tulip Toppling, Daffodil Destroying, Crocus Crushing snowfall.”

He was right. Caz got over a foot of the heaviest, stickiest, wettest snow of the entire winter. We’ve had a few deeper snowfalls this past season, but none as snowblower clogging as this one. The alert reader might notice that I don’t generally post during the day, because I don’t generally post from work. Despite spending over an hour forcing the snowblower to move the snow out of the driveway, I did not get in to work.

(more…)