Last week we posted several panoramic views of the May, 2007 Catalina Island Wildfire that were imaged by the Catalina Interior WebCam. This morning, I took a look at the webcam image, I saw the morning sunrise greeting me as it rose above the marine stratus layer. The webcam, which is on a peak on the island, happened to be above the temperature inversion which often traps the low clouds and fog beneath along the California Coastline. This dramatic image of the rising Sun is the result.
An artist’s sketch? Not really. This is a post-processed picture of the Point Vicente Lighthouse that Damsel took through her telephoto lens just after last Christmas.
I processed it with a freeware graphics program I use called Irfanview. I used edge-detection and inverted the colors (negative) to get this rendering.
This Plumeria, seen in the garden shop today, is supposed to be very fragrant, but I didn’t get much fragrance when I leaned over to smell it. I looked it up on WikiPedia and found this out about the Plumeria:
Plumeria flowers are most fragrant at night in order to lure sphinx moths to pollinate them. The flowers have no nectar, and simply dupe their pollinators. The moths inadvertently pollinate them by transferring pollen from flower to flower in their fruitless search for nectar.
When we went to the Cactus and Succulent Exhibition last month, we picked up a 3-inch cutting from an epiphyllum in a small plastic planter. We put it in the patio and this week it produced this beautiful ‘frühlingsgold’ flower. Frühlingsgold translates from German to ‘spring gold’ in English.
UPDATE: New Panoramas added at the bottom.
There is a wildfire on Catalina Island this evening. Near real time pictures are available on the Catalina Interior Webcam from Los Angeles Coastal Monitoring Network “interior webcam.”
I made this composite panoramic view of the fire at just after 7:20 PM (Pacific Daylight Time) this evening. Click on the panoramas for a full-sized view.
Update – 7:50 PM:
More updates below the fold.
This video is from a collection of SOHO images taken over the operational lifetime of the spacecraft (a little more than eleven years). In it you can see some of the more spectacular solar activity that occurred over that period.
“The Sun is anything but a stable, yellow ball in the sky.” That quote is the opening line of commentary in a recently-produced NASA video about the STEREO project — another spaceborne observation system that captures solar images in three dimensions.
I look forward to seeing a three-dimensional equivalent of this video from STEREO in the not-to-distant future.
Off to the Supreme Court for the Washington D.C. Gun Ban:
A federal appeals court May 8 denied a petition by D.C. officials to reconsider a March ruling that overturned the District`s 30-year-old gun ban. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 6-4 to deny the District`s request that the entire court review a previous ruling in which a three-judge panel found some of the District`s gun restrictions to be unconstitutional.
What I want to know is Why aren’t D.C. residents allowed to get guns now? Their gun-grabbing law has been declared UNCONSTITUTIONAL! TWICE!
Update: These two articles discuss the next steps for D.C. and the effects on gun owners: