Lunar Bovine - Jason Cobill's Weblog » Photography

Superlative Moon!

jcobill — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:48:18 +0000

I have a bit of a pet peeve with the way astronomical events are ‘advertised’ to the general public. I had a bad experience back in 2002, bringing a gang out to the outskirts of Winnipeg at 3am on a frosty mid-November morning to catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. It was great – except earlier that day the local paper ran a copy of this picture portraying the 1833 meteor shower, setting high expectations. I counted close to two hundred shooting stars in the first hour, but most of the gang packed up and left in a huff when the skies didn’t explode into fireworks.

The lunar clockwork moves along with some pretty regular precision, and that’s why I’m especially annoyed by all this hype about the “Supermoon”. The Moon orbits Earth every 27 days, and it’s in perigee & at full phase (Super!) about 5 times a year, which makes it a pretty common event. It’s the same colour and shape as usual. The supermoon is not really a big deal. Astronomers don’t even observe the event – they call it “perigee-syzygy” and it’s marked in their calendars as a particularly annoying night to try to observe stars.

With a title like “Supermoon” though, you expect some rare fireworks display in the skies – the Moon bleeds rainbows down into the ocean while a ring of volcanoes go off on it’s surface. I think the media pushing the Supermoon story are setting laypeople up for disappointment. When is it going to get Super!? It’s just the Moon – but fractionally bigger/brighter than yesterday!

The Moon’s still cool in it’s own right though. Go out and look at it just for the sake of seeing it!

Squirrels Moving In

jcobill — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:00:25 +0000

There’s a new squirrel moving in to the tree in the front yard – we had a grey squirrel for a while, but this black squirrel seems to have asserted itself and captured the territory. We’ll see how that plays out. I suspect squirrel territory has pretty flexible boundaries. There have been squirrels chasing each other around the neighborhood treetops with loud yipping noises all week.

Green!

jcobill — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:51:58 +0000

We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this general region of our flower garden last year. So I’m going to go ahead and wager that these are, in fact, tulips.

(Pretty sure irises come up ‘wrapped’ in their outer leaves, and crocii are shorter and come up with thin narrow shoots next to the main plant)
(Update: An anonymous tipster suggests they may be daffodils! Time will tell!)

Cosmic Glass Bubblescapes

jcobill — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 03:24:03 +0000

I’m very excited by the glassblowing workshop I’m taking – I’m having a blast mixing colours into glowing hot glass and then twisting and squashing and blowing it into all kinds of amazing forms. The colour of blown glass is amazing – it’s so rich and saturated and has a brilliant quality that shimmers when the light hits it.

Whiter Shade of Pale

jcobill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:52:20 +0000

Snapped a picture looking out over the experimental farm through this morning’s rolling fog. Those are trees and a little shed. No horizon line, though – just white meeting white.

Space Vortex

jcobill — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:16:40 +0000

I’m building a slide-photography rig to be able to quickly capture a bunch of old family photos, but didn’t expect the inside of a PVC pipe to be so shiny. So my first few attempts produced some really fun swirly distortions that I thought were neat.

A good friend lent me his slide scanner, which does an awesome job, but takes like two minutes per frame to scan them in – if I’m going to go through a box of a few hundred, I need something a bit faster. Turns out a digital camera set to macro and shot through a dark tube (lined with not-shiny black construction paper) can get pretty decent images! I’ll take a photo of my rig once I have it all figured out.

Need a Wider Blog

jcobill — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:00:35 +0000

Caught some deer out by the airport as we drove out to pick up Mom from work – and got a great panorama of Winnipeg while I was at it. Sorry if I’m reinforcing stereotypes – it’s not all fields, airports and grain elevators.

Luminous Shapes

jcobill — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:27:42 +0000

I snapped some pictures of will’o'the’wisps tonight out in the rain.

Sunflower

jcobill — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:30:53 +0000

I couldn’t resist hopping off the bus at the Experimental Farm to snap a real-life example of a phyllotactic spiral. Then I missed the next bus, chasing bees around with my camera. I still managed to make it to work on time!

Pictory’s Freaky Foods

jcobill — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:29:24 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of “Pictory” since it started, a cool website full of interesting photos and stories loosely gathered around their theme of the month. Their topic this go-around is hard to stomach, though – literally. “Eat at Your Own Risk” presents a number of creatures I didn’t know existed (including the totally alien ‘Pissing Shrimp’). I don’t want to even know if they’re edible. Why would you put it in your mouth? It’s just not right!

Prepare to be astonished!