So, it was time for another mountain trip. It had been a few years since I’d been last, to the Blue Ridge area in NC, but over fifteen since I’d been to the Lake Rabun area of Georgia. This time around, I was accompanied by The Girlfriend and The Girlfriend’s Sprog, neither of which had been to Lake Rabun. We only had time for a brief trip, but it was enough time
Category: Too Cool
Daily Jim pic 11
This one also got into the ‘Too cool’ category, and it’s a favorite of mine. This is (I’m pretty sure – again, Jim didn’t tell me when he sent the stack of photos) a geothermal vent that passes through a layer of grey clay, and so produces a witches cauldron of bubbling mud. And Jim was able to capture one of the bubbles as it popped. It’s
Too cool, part 35: A modicum of success
The praying mantids have been an ongoing saga on this blog now for several years, and if you want to call it an obsession, no argument from me. While I am definitely motivated to capture sequences and behavior of any species that I can, I happen to like mantids, and I’ve had the opportunities to bear close witness to them. So here we are again.
Not having found any distinctive evidence of local
Too cool, part 34: A chronicle in amber
I had initially said that I wasn’t timely on this, and that was even a few days earlier when I’d started to type this up, but then I realized how much I was falling for the same trap that has made “news’ the pathetic state of affairs that it is now. Scientific findings of this nature don’t have this bare moment of interest, like a celebrity doing something stupid, but
Too cool, part 32… and maybe 33
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and finally sat down to tackle it. You have to admit, it definitely fits into the ‘Too cool’ category, and offers a great insight into the rising air masses that form thundercells.
We are revisiting the photos taken during my July trip to the Outer Banks
Too cool, part 31: Found Philae! Maybe…
Courtesy of Astronomy Picture of the Day, we have actual images of the Philae lander in its resting place on Comet C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and you definitely will want to not only click on that link, but on the image therein to
Too cool, part 30: Not even halfway yet
You know, I started wondering why I’ve never tackled this before, and then I realized it was because I never had something handy to use for the comparison.
You remember the photo from an earlier post, showing the newborn Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis) clustered on a twig? You know, this one:
That was taken within 24 hours of hatching, and while I have nothing to provide
Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’
Too cool, part 28: Wholly molty!
Seriously, I really need to stop doing titles like that…
This is going to be the longest post on the blog. Not in terms of words, but in terms of images, since I am going to show a long sequence from the other evening, and they’re nearly all vertical format, so the linear dimensions of the post are going to be exceptional. This may result in some gaps between text blocks, so please excuse
Early morning storm
I was just about to go to bed when I heard the soft rumbling, and went outside to note the flashes in the sky, from all directions that could be called, “west.” I came back in and pulled up this lovely site I stumbled across, a real-time lightning map. From that, I could see the bulk of activity was west-southwest