Have yourselves a Merry Little Christmas.
Oh, and Happy Birthday to Damsel – 12/24!
Christmas Butterfly
Every once in a while, I get to capture an image that ranks right up there with some of Damsel’s best photos. This time, it was purely unintentional, in that I went out to photograph some shrubs with a before photo before I started on trimming them. When I got out to the palo verde where Damsel had decorated the green tree with some red Christmas ornaments for the season, a butterfly suddenly came out of nowhere and posed on one of her ornaments. Chalk this one up to luck – AND the fact that there are still butterflies, songbirds, humming birds and other critters that remain here in spite of the cooler temperatures. We LOVE Arizona! Click on the image to enlarge.
NIST Time Widget
Quite by accident, I found this widget at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website, time.gov. I was looking for the NIST time applet, but siince I have Java® disabled, I was unable to view the time. Then, I noticed a link on that page to their Flash® NIST Widget.
Once I clicked on the link to the widget, I saw another link to a page that published details about embedding the widget on your own website. That page had the HTML embed code along with details on how to customize the widget for your own preferences of how to display the time, background color and time zone. I set this one to ?setcolor=#EAEDF2&setzone=-07&set24=true which represent the parameters for our light blue background color, the UTC minus seven timezone (Arizona) and to display the time in 24 hour format.
Since I already have my own Flash® time and date widget in the sidebar on the main page, I doubt that I will be embedding this one. Note that my widget is driven by the time YOUR computer is set to and the NIST widget gets the time from the NIST Time and Frequency Division (with a minor network delay).
Pastel Clouds Over Saguaro Cactus
We were treated to this colorful display in the sky this afternoon. I first noticed the rainbow through the front window, so I grabbed my camera and went out in the shadow of our saguaro in our driveway to get this shot. Click on the image to enlarge.
Christmas Mailbox Flowers
I like to decorate our mailbox with plastic flowers. I just changed out the autumn colors with these pretty poinsettias for the Christmas season. There is an antique milk can surrounding the mailbox post that is filled with sand. It makes a handy place to put the stems of the flowers into. Click on the image to enlarge.
Autumn Colors
This is one of many trees around town that have changed colors from the summer green to all shades of yellows, oranges and reds. This tree is located along the main drag (US 60) a half mile west of old downtown. Click on the image to enlarge.
On-Line Solar Movie Maker
This morning, I browsed my usual daily visits on the internet. When I got to the webpage at SpaceWeather.com, I noticed several sunspots were visible on the “Daily Sun” feature in the left sidebar. That made me have the urge to go out and capture an image of the sun over Arizona to see if I could resolve any of the sunspots. There were three distinct spots in my image, which I labeled, as seen on the right. The solar north pole is at about the ten o’clock point in the image I made. I didn’t bother to rotate the solar image to align the pole at the top as I sometimes do. Click on the image to enlarge.
I visited the SOHO Sunspot page to get the designation numbers of the sunspots in the photo, I noticed a link to a new feature called Helioviewer which purported to allow users anywhere make their own custom images and movies. After fooling with the website a bit, I made the video below to document the spots in my image. The motion starts about 24 hours before advancing to how the sun looked today. Solar north is up and the recording was made through a hydrogen alpha (or equivalent) filter. The bright spots are the location of the spots in my image above. See this screenshot from the Helioviewer site for reference.
