Stone Mountain Night Pictures

Tonight, the second night that Anna and Jessica are away in Minnesota for Thanksgiving, Elyse and I went to Stone Mountain to do some star gazing and to visit the Stone Mountain Christmas.

First we went to the walk-up trail, hoping that would be a dark enough area to allow us to see the stars.

Elyse thought it was really cool that she could draw in the air with her flashlight during the long exposures my Canon made. Here she is drawing a star:

and a smiley face:

and spelling the word "pizza" (we had just had supper at Stevi B's):

(I had to flip this one horizontally, because she spelled it from her perspective, which made it backwards when you're facing her.)

Here are some of the star pictures I took:

Here's a picture facing the direction of the airport, which is a good 50 miles away. This is an eight-second exposure; the streaks in the middle of the frame were made by five airplanes that had recently taken off; they represent eight seconds of the planes' flight paths:

Next we went to the Crossroads area, to take in some nighttime Stone Mountain Christmas:

(You can't tell from these pictures, which make it look like we had the whole place to ourselves, but there were a lot of people there.)

The dinosaurs from the recently-ended Dinosaur Explore exhibition haven't been removed yet, they've just been dressed up for the season:

Anna and Jessica Head Off to Minnesota for Thanksgiving

This afternoon I took Anna and Jessica to the airport to get on a plane and fly to Minnesota so they can spend Thanksgiving with Anna's family. They're both excited to be going, but also a little nervous, and sad to be leaving me and Elyse behind.

Elyse the Unicorn

This afternoon Elyse wanted to go to Vines Gardens so we could do a unicorn photo shoot (with her as the unicorn). Here are some of the best pictures we got:

Goodbye, Tessie

This morning was heartbreaking. We said goodbye to Tesseract. We miss her terribly.

Here she is about five months ago, keeping Elyse company one night while Elyse read in our bed:

Tessie was only about three months short of her eighteenth birthday, which is quite old for a cat. Her health had been deteriorating rapidly for the past couple of weeks, though, and her quality of life was really suffering, and it was, we are so sorry to say, her time to go. She was a wonderful companion, especially for Anna, and her departure has left a big hole in our lives.

When Anna and I got married we had six cats, which didn't seem like a lot in those pre-kids days. After Jessica was born, and especially after we had Elyse, six started to seem like an awful lot of cats. We may have come to think of six cats as too many, but now no cats living with us is definitely way too few.

Mommy and Elyse at The Nutcracker

Anna and Elyse went to see The Nutcracker tonight, anf they just texted me this picture:

Stargazing with Elyse

Elyse has been very interested in astronomy lately, so tonight we went to Bay Creek Park to spend some time in as much dark as we could find (though not quite as much as I'd hoped) looking up at the stars. We found a decent spot on one of the baseball fields from which quite a few stars were visible. I took my "real" camera, a Canon 60D, and tripod so I could take some long exposures of the night sky; here are a couple of my favorites:

(The streaks in the sky are airplanes; these were 15- or 30-second exposures, and that's how far an airplane moves across the night sky in 15 or 30 seconds.)

Girl Scout Pirates

Today was Pirate Day for Elyse's troop!

Thursday Morning Walk at Vines Park

Jessica Prepares Granny and Pa's House for Halloween

Wednesday Morning Walk at Stone Mountain's Indian Island

Serendipity 2018

This weekend Anna and the girls went to Serendipity, the annual Girl Scout gathering at Camp Meriwether. They've been going every year for quite a while now; I believe this was Anna and Jessica's sixth year there, and Elyse's fourth.

Here are some pictures Anna texted me of their activities:

(You might be able to tell in this picture that it rained some of the time.)

(Elyse really enjoyed archery.)

You might notice that Elyse is in different clothes in the picture immediately above than she is in the others. By this point she had changed into her ballet outfit so should could do the dance she's been rehearsing for weeks now--her own take on "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy--at the talent show. They tell me it went very well. Unfortunately, they had to use Anna's phone to play the music, so she couldn't take any pictures. (Note to anyone reading this years in the future: Yes, in 2018 we use things we call "phones" to play music and take pictures. They are also occasionally used to make calls, but frankly not the often.)

I don't know if this picture was taken before or after her talent-show performance, but I do know it was taken at sunset:

International Space Station Sightings

For the past four nights, the girls and I have gone outside around dusk to look up and watch for the International Space Station. We've seen it every night.

It's very high up, about 250 miles, so you can't count the cells in its photovoltaic arrays or read the markings on its fuselage or exchange friendly waves with the crew. It looks like a bright star – a lot like Venus – except that it moves fairly rapidly across the sky. In fact, it's moving at 17,500 miles per hour (it orbits the Earth about once every ninety minutes), so if it's visible in the sky above your house for four minutes, then by the time it disappears it has traveled nearly 1,200 miles. Of course, since it's so high up it doesn't look like it's going that fast, only about as fast as an airplane appears to be moving when you see it overhead. (The space station doesn't have visible blinking lights or red lights like an airplane flying in the night sky does, however, so if you think you're seeing the ISS but it's blinking, what you're actually seeing is probably an airplane that's really high up.)

Of course, you can't just go out randomly at night and look up and expect to see the ISS, you need to refer to the following Web site to know when you can see it:

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/index.cfm

You may have to zoom out on the map to find the location closest to you where "sighting opportunities" are charted, and interpreting the Max Height and Appears / Disappears information is a bit of a challenge; we've found that if you're vigilant about searching the sky around the time when it's supposed to become visible, you can find it within a minute or so.

Oh, Deer!

This guy crossed the path right in front of me as I was headed back to my car:

Friday Morning Walk at McDaniel Park

Jessica and Elyse's 2018 School Portraits