The Subtlety of Grandness

Just another typical day in Plymouth, I suppose. Tomorrow is my first day off in 18 days.

Another weekend, another weekend festival here in Plymouth.  Last weekend was the 4th of July festivities. This weekend it’s Art in the Park, which must be the biggest festival all year, because I’ve never seen downtown Plymouth so packed. It’s high summer, and there are thousands upon thousands milling about the artisan booths. It reminds me quite a bit of the U District’s annual street fair in Seattle. Anyway, since it is high summer and ungodly bright and hot outside, I dusted off the old DP1, since shooting in bright daylight is just about all it can do. With that said, it delivers amazing performance, especially for its compact size.

This the first confirmed photo of an extrasolar planet. In other words, this is the first planet outside of our own solar system that we’ve ever seen directly. (The planet is the tiny dot in the upper middle left; the big thing in the middle is its star.) We can detect planets without seeing them, usually by the gravitational wobble that they create on their stars. However, the distances between the stars is so vast it’s impossible to actually “see” those planets until now. This photo was taken from about 500 light years away, so the light reflecting off this planet bounced off of it sometime shortly after Columbus arrived in the New World. Put another way, this light has traveled approximately 3,000,000,000,000,000 miles to get here. In comparison, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, and it’s just one of billions upon billions of galaxies in the universe. Makes you feel kinda small, doesn’t it?

Plaque in the town square. Still testing out the iPhone 4 camera. That is pretty darn good, but you should see the full-res version. Most impressive.

Taken in late December, 2009. Click to zoom!

MS posted an updated version of its superb Image Composite Editor and I recently upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. So I dug up a bunch of photos taken three years ago on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, moored in Alameda, just across the bay from San Francisco. Stitched them together, and voila. Click to zoom!

And, in a bit of trivia, the balcony of my old place is barely visible in this photo.

Downtown Seattle on an absolutely frigid winter day a few years ago. I went out on a ferry to Bainbridge Island a couple of days after Christmas and stood out on deck; despite being heavily clad the ice cold wind still managed to chill me to the bone. Not my smartest idea. I ended up getting horrendously ill that night.

As I was transferring my photo archive to Lightroom I stumbled upon these photos that I shot two years ago (April 28, 2007) at about 6 in the morning. I’m looking eastward, toward the rising sun and downtown San Francisco. There’s some really amazing cloud formations at work here. There appear to be airliner contrails at the top of the photo, but I’ve wondereed what’s causing that quill-like structure that’s descending toward the Pyramid. Anyway, this is what can happen when you wake up hideously early in the morning.

Here’s a panorama of the Bay Bridge. Taken from the rooftop of a friend’s Jackson Square condo. Click to embiggen!

Took this a couple of weeks ago from Crissy Field just after the Blue Angels wrapped up practice for the day.

I shot this one the day before, from the Marin Headlands. As always, click for the big versions.