Overcast with a chance of color

I'll be in a jet plane bound for California in two hours.

Speckled Saturn

What a curious shot from Cassini...

Meanwhile, in Ohio...

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The planetary debris has settled:Pluto kicked to the curb

"After a tumultuous week at the 26th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague, a resolution was passed that defines a planet in our solar system in such a way that only Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune qualify.

"From now on, smaller round objects that orbit the Sun -- including the asteroid Ceres, the former planet Pluto, and the Kuiper Belt iceball with the provisional designation 2003 UB313 -- will be called 'dwarf planets.' The explicit intent of the IAU members who voted with the majority today was that a 'dwarf planet' is not a planet."

This is three-day-old news, of course, but I wanted to provide a segue to a story with a wonderful headline that was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Friday: Pluto's demotion divides astrologers, troubles Scorpios.

The desert flooras seen fromthe desert sky

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Wasn't I surprised to spy the spires of Monument Valley from 31,000 feet? We'd passed over Lake Powell several minutes earlier, and as I gazed across the desert I thought it would be cool to see those iconic landforms. I saw them at ground level eight years ago.

Sure enough, they were soon visible to the south-southwest. In the linked image, check the purple towers that rise from the ground below the wingtip.

I recently StumbledUpon a page about refining [hazy] aerial photos, so I'll likely repost better images.

Nor-Cal crescent

Some attempts at capturing the Balsamic Moon
from my seat on the Coast Starlight.






And one video:

Norcal balsamic

Bay City sights

Slowly but surely, I will place my U.S. tour photos online. I'll need to stay in one place for a couple of days in order to do that, however. In a few hours, I'll leave San Francisco to go to Dayton, OH (having arrived here from Seattle just two days ago).












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And here's a little video on the side:

Beach foam 1
Beach foam 2
Beach foam 3

Late-season sunflowers

These sunflowers were grown in a four- or five-foot-long mailing tube. I perforated and then filled the tube with soil, and then I duct-taped the bottom to prevent water from completely weakening the cardboard.

Despite the heat (this whole setup was situated in the asphalt lot behind my building, along with tomatoes and chile peppers), the plant produced dozens of rust-tinged flowers. This was a variety of the plant that grows wild in New Mexico and Colorado.

High-speed threadingof a high-altitude needle

I was walking by Lowell Elementary in Seattle when I took notice of a diffuse solar halo. I took a couple of shots of that, and then noticed the contrail that was being left by a plane directly under the Sun. I could see the offset shadow that the plane was casting, so I quickly made three more images.



These are simply referred to as contrail shadows on Les Cowley's Atmospheric Optics site: "Like other clouds, contrails cast shadows. These shadows fall on a thin, lower layer of cirrus cloud. We see the shadow from the other side of the layer, like looking through the back of a screen."

For the record, the photos were taken at 2:48~2:50 p.m., Aug. 15, in Seattle. The Sun was at 49 degrees(?).

Crystal-coloredcloudscapes, continued

This was how it began.


"These nacreous clouds were photographed by Cherie Ude at McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2004. Nacreous clouds glow brightly with vivid iridescent colours. They are wave clouds and their undulating, sheet-like forms reveal the winds and waves of the stratosphere."

Five skies

A continuation of the flight photos











These were taken between Seoul and Tokyo on Sunday. Soon enough, I'll post the photos from Seattle... and then I'll be on my way to San Francisco.

Will the real ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth planets please stand up?

This relates to the hubbub over 2003 UB313 and other objects that some say ought to be called planets, while Pluto ought to be taken off the list.


"The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the lower end of the planet scale: what defines the difference between 'planets' and 'solar system bodies'? If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered from 14 to 25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will consist of 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon and 2003 UB313.

"The IAU is a worldwide organization of distinguished astronomers. It has been the official arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since its founding in 1919."

Airborne atmospherics

Now, to answer Scout's question: These were taken with a Fujifilm Q1 4-megapixel digicam. They'd be better on film, of course, but I didn't buy any rolls before I flew to Seattle. I didn't want to bother with the big Nikon and have concern about the film being X-rayed.

Another autumn leaf in August

This was the first example.

East Sea scenery

Simple Seorak starscapes

I lugged more photo and astro gear than I needed to the beach last week. The idea has just about sunken in that just because a place is designated as a national park or a resort area, it doesn't mean that it will be neon-, floodlight-, traffic- or crowd-free.

Sinai spoiled me.

South Korea is 70% mountains with a population of 55 million. So where there's flat space, you'll find people. And at night, those people will most likely have lights.



Still, with the East Sea so close, there was something like dark sky to be seen beyond and above the tent.





More South Korean scenery here

Neon Moon rising

Taken from the westbound lane
of a nearby street

Post-retrograde repairs

I had no idea that there were perhaps scores of photos missing from the Yeoju directory, which meant that many posts about Korea have had no images. I'm uploading those that I can find now, and if others remain missing, then I'll have to reprocess them.

What a jacked-up mess.

Hiroshima on my mind

I had considered going to Hiroshima during our break last week, but when I looked into ferry departures and estimated some costs earlier in the summer, I decided to stay in-country (as you've seen). I still want to visit the city, so perhaps that will happen in the fall.

In any case, Sunday was the anniversary of the atomic bombing in 1945. While we were in Gangwon-do, I saw a promo for a show about the bombing that was going to air on the Discovery Channel. One of the elderly Enola Gay crewmen ardently asserted that he doesn't think about the people who died, he just thinks about all the (American) people who didn't die because of the actions of his crew and that of Bock's Car.

And I sighed, then said to My Lady Friend, "Keep on rationalising it like that, guy."

The arrival of this anniversary amid the current warfare in Lebanon, Israel and Iraq has stirred up an idea about time-coordinated visualization and meditation that had first come to mind as we prepared to leave Taiwan. More on that later.

And on a somewhat related note, I just found out that Shohei Imamura died. His film "Black Rain" deals directly with the bombing, while "Dr. Akagi" (a curious film that I saw in Santa Fe years ago, and which I've seen for sale at curious places around Seoul) is a character drama that ends with the bombing.

A couple of sidestreet scenes

Scenes from the shorenear Seoraksan

I've finished uploading the first of three sets of photos from our recent travels across the country. They're the most recent images, taken while we spent a couple hot days and cooler (but noisy, firework-filled nights) on a beach in Gangwon province.





These images were produced with the little Fuji digicam. Four rolls of film will be processed tomorrow. Perhaps I'll get select images from that group together, along with the images from Mallipo and Woraksan [and Tokyo, still!], before I leave for Seattle.

Three more for the road

Meanwhile, on Mars...

"This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board Mars Express, shows the regions of Granicus Valles and Tinjar Valles. The northwest-aligned Granicus Valles and Tinjar Valles may have been formed partly through the action of subsurface water. The two valleys are part of the Utopia-Planitia region, an area thought to be covered by a layer of lava that flowed from the northwest flanks of Elysium Mons, which rises 12.5 kilometres above the surrounding plain [not pictured]."

We went for a walkaround Woraksan.

My Lady Friend and I are back for a bit before heading to the East Sea (known outside of Korea as the Sea of Japan). Earlier in the week, we visited Woraksan National Park in Chungcheongbuk-do province. We spent a couple of nights in Suanbo, a resort village with many hot springs.

This is the barest bit of an update because the scans of the negatives leave a lot to be desired... and I have to be up and functional in the morning. Having seen what the difference is between the index prints and the scans [from the same lab!], I think that you'll be treated to many, many imaging remixes from Egypt, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan and the old hanguk homestead after I'm able to scan the negs myself.

Crystal-colored cloudscapes

"A rare and spectacular cloud formation has been seen at the end of the polar night on 25 July at Australia's Mawson Station in Antarctica.

"These so-called nacreous clouds were situated high in the stratosphere, some 20km above the ground, and reveal very cold temperatures in the rarefied atmosphere... The delicate colours were produced when the fading light at sunset passed through tiny water-ice crystals blown along on a strong jet of stratospheric air."


"This particular cloud formation appeared over Iceland at an altitude of about 22 km on February 4, 2003."

By way of The Knight Science Journalism Tracker