Category: Photos

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Finally getting around to sorting through photos from a walk at the pond and botanical gardens at Polliwog Park…um…two months ago.

Two ducklings with mottled brown feathers swim, following their mother, who has similar coloring. A third is off to the side, not far from where a turtle's head is poking out of the water.

The third duckling on the right was spooked by the turtle surfacing its head right next to it. Between this shot and the next, a few seconds later, it had darted away and hidden behind its mother!

The same two ducklings and their mother, only the third duckling is nowhere to be seen. For that matter, neither is the turtle.

Ducks (mostly mallards like these), coots and geese (mostly Canada Geese) make this pond one of their regular migratory spots. Seagulls, pigeons and crows stop by regularly. Smaller birds mostly stick to the other parts of the park. The turtles, like those in most of the ponds around here, are feral – released pets and their descendants.

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Yes, it turns out a colander *does* make a fun instrument for observing a solar eclipse! Also, thinking about how common eclipses actually are.

Circular shadow on the sidewalk, with lots of bright crescents inside, all facing the same direction.

For a lot of reasons, we didn’t arrange another road trip to see today’s total eclipse like we did in 2017 (which was amazing, by the way!). It was only partial out here in California, and not even with as high a magnitude as the one last October.

But we had clear skies, so we broke out the eclipse glasses from 2017 again. After testing them first by looking directly as a bright indoor lamp to make sure there were no scratches. And I’d heard that colanders make interesting patterns (each hole works as a pinhole camera) much like overlapping leaves do, so I brought that out — as you can see, it worked quite well!

I do kind of regret not being able to get out to see this one as total. Partial eclipses can be really cool, especially if you have multiple ways to observe them, but XKCD has a point. There really isn’t any comparison to experiencing totality, and it doesn’t come through very well in photos.

I bet northern Spain is already booked for 2026.

It is interesting to think that solar eclipses happen every year — usually twice! — but they’re not always total, and they’re only visible from a small part of the planet at a time. And sometimes that’s a slice of, say, Antarctica or Siberia or out in the middle of the ocean. Not rare for the planet, but definitely rare for any given location.

On one hand, it’s no wonder people used to see them as omens. With travel and communication slow (and in many cases impossible) in the ancient world, if you’re only going on what’s been seen in your area, it seems super-rare and unpredictable. On the other hand, cultures with sophisticated enough astronomy like the ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the eclipse cycle thousands of years ago!

One bit of funny timing: We’ve been catching up on the last season of The Magicians. Today we got up to an episode that…well, let’s just say the moon figures very prominently in it!

Update: Axios posted a nice map last week showing how fully booked AirBnBs are for the day in different parts of the US…which shows the path of totality *very* clearly!

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It was hazy, and the weather forecast was partly cloudy, but the sun stayed visible and the eclipse glasses (used here for the photo) haven’t cracked!

Yellow-orange circle on a black background, with a circular chunk apparently cut out of it.

We didn’t do anything complicated this time: just took the glasses with us as we went about our morning, looking through the glasses every 15-20 minutes to see how much was covered until it reached its maximum coverage of 78% of the sun’s apparent diameter.

And at projections. Leaves are nature’s original pinhole camera!

A bunch of overlapping bright crescents of light on the ground.

A road trip like 2017 to see the full annular eclipse would have been cool, but it just wasn’t something we could do this time around, and with clear visibility, there wasn’t any need to seek higher ground like 2012.

Here’s peak coverage for this area, again viewed through eclipse glasses.

Yellow-orange crescent on a black background.

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A photo of Venus and Jupiter close together in tonight's sky, and a close-up that appears to have very blurry images of Jupiter's moons.

Dark blue sky, blurry bushes off to the right. In the middle of the sky are two bright spots right next to each other, the right one noticeably brighter.

With rainstorms for the first half of the week, I figured the sky would be clouded over, and I completely forgot about the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter tonight.

Despite wind, rain and even hail today, it cleared up this afternoon. I happened to run out for groceries and looked up from the parking lot to see a blue sky with Venus and Jupiter right next to each other!

I snapped a quick shot with my phone. And then got out the good camera and tripod when I got home.

And…I think I may have caught some of Jupiter’s moons?!?

Closeup: two white circles against a dark blue background. The one on the right is bigger and has diffraction rays radiating from it. The one on the left doesn't, but there are two faint, blurry dots above it aligned with the disc.

The brighter planet to the right is Venus. The almost-as-bright one to the left is Jupiter. Venus shows diffraction rays, but Jupiter doesn’t…but those dots lined up on one side of it? They’re in the right location to be Callisto, Ganymede and (possibly) Io!

I’ve got to remember to use the telephoto after getting the wide shot the next time I’m taking night sky photos with planets. Just in case.