Putting aside the distasteful origins of the Olympic torch relay for a moment, today's voyage of the flame down the Thames was, at the very least, a good opportunity for a look at the new Royal Barge Gloriana. So I picked up a camera and wandered down the road to the footpath by the new flats near the mouth of the Wandle to take a few snaps.

The Olympic flotilla was small enough that it was easy to see the barge as it came down the Putney reach of the river, past Hurlingham, and as it turned up to pass under Wandsworth Bridge. The large cauldron at the bows of the barge had been extinguished, and the torch was being held by a young woman, as it rowed down-river with the tide, all gold and yellow, flags fluttering in the summer breeze.









So nice of them to name the barge after one of my favourite Michael Moorcock novels.

Putney, London
July 2012

If you're going to watch an eclipse, and you can't get to the point of totality, then there's not many places better than Maker Faire. With so many geeks to hand you know there's going to be lots of different ways to see the return of Fenrir...

And so we saw the 2012 annular eclipse (or around 89.5% of it) through dark film eclipse viewers, through hacked pinhole cameras (ours was aptly made from a Geek Dad postcard flyer), through mylar film, through a solar telescope (complete with sunspots!), and of course, cast in shadows from hands, hats, and trees.


Through dark film


In the shadow of marypcb's hand


Through a pinhole in a business card


In the shadow of a tree


Through mylar film

All in all, an awesome eclipse. And made the more so by sharing it with thousands of people enjoying it as much as we were.

Last night we sat in our friends' garden in Silicon Valley, watching the moon rise over the trees that line the little creek that runs behind their house. It was the 2012 supermoon, the closest full moon of the year where the moon is 14% bigger than normal...

I had my long lens with me, and remembering that I was photographing reflected sunlight dialed up my exposure to 1/2500^th of a second. With a little judicious cropping here are a couple of shots taken as the moon floated through a gap on the acacias...





San Jose, California
May 2012

There's a house down our street with a dragon on the roof.

It's a proud wee terracotta beastie, rising up on its haunches, wings spread, to greet the sun and the cloud alike. It stares up at the passing planes as they glide down to Heathrow, counting the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the centuries. It's our Clock Of The Long Now, older than us all and destined to outlast our scurrying little lives.

It looks down on Putney, it watches and it waits.

I like it a lot.







Every street needs a dragon.

Spring has started to arrive in London, at long last.

So what is a south-west Londoner to do on a sunny March afternoon? Why, they go to Richmond Park for a walk around the ponds.

We weren't the only transplanted Londoners there, as the feral parakeets were taking the opportunity to noisily begin their mating season. I took a photograph of a pair necking in a tree as we walked through a small wood near Pen Ponds.



There's something alien about seeing a parrot in London, but they're certainly colourful.



Richmond Park, London
March 2012

After yesterday's foul weather, today was clear and cold. Ideal weather for a little photography, and as luck would have it UK Steam Info showed that a mainline steam excursion was going to be passing through Putney at lunch time.

So I wandered out to the footbridge down the road (actually, more hobbled and limped as I'm still recovering from dislocating my knee in a nasty fall a couple of weeks back) and waited for the Orient Express to come down the line from Clapham. It was a little late, and as I waited I got to see a Windhoff MPV running as a de-icing train at work, spraying the tracks up the line to London. It's not often we see modern plant at work on our line in the middle of the commuting day.



But then in the distance came a whistle, and the distinctive sound of a steam locomotive. In the cold, crisp air the steam rose higher than usual, filling the Putney Station cutting as the Clan Line came round the curve from Wandsworth pulling a rake of Orient Express Pullman carriages full of business folk on a lunchtime corporate jolly...



Clan Line is temporarily running as Belgian Marine, hence the change in number from my photograph of one its the summer runs through Putney.



And in a cloud of steam and smoke it was gone, racing through the station and heading on out towards Windsor.



Black and white seemed appropriate...

Putney, London
December 2011

There's a fountain in the garden of our friends' house in Silicon Valley, and we've taken to sitting outside under the canopy where we can work and listen to the trickle of water. It's refreshing there in the shade, in the slight breeze of a California afternoon.

We're not the only critters that like that fountain, and it's regularly visited by all manner of birds that my European ornithological skills regularly misidentify (like the grey bird with a rose-red head that isn't a linnet but instead is the remarkably prosaic house finch). However one bird that's easy to spot is the tiny nectar-fueled speed-freak that is the hummingbird - and they too treat the fountain as a filling station.

This afternoon one came hovering by, whirring like a clockwork steampunk drone, and made its way to the fountain, glistening green in the summer sun, darting first this way, then that, before settling to drink its fill...

My camera (as always) was ready, and I managed to capture a sequence of the bird first approaching and then landing on the fountain.







Such cuteness.

(But inside it's an angry Aztec warrior)

Willow Glen, California
June 2011

Driving north out of LA can get tedious. Take 101 and blast through the interminable suburbs to Ventura, or 5 up and over the Tejons and onto the eternal flatness of the Central Valley? So why not do something different instead?

That's why we found the Mount Pinos route, up 5 to Frazier Mlountain Park and then climbing to 6000" and along a north western ridge of the mountains, before dropping down the curving slopes to the Cuyama Valley. That last part of the drive is the most scenic, as you roll along the top of the ridge, following its sinuous curves from peak to peak, and rock to rock.

We were driving that route a week or so ago when we saw a white pickup and a ranger carrying what looked like a small TV antenna. Wondering what she was doing we pulled into a layby with a magnificent view over the slopes and hills to the north. Then we saw what she was tracking: first a handful of dots in the sky, and the bigger and bigger, the wide wings catching the afternoon updrafts from the slopes.

California condors, five of them.



As one swooped closer we could see its tracking beacon, a whip antenna protruding from one enormous wing.



They spiraled over us, higher and higher.



And then they were gone, off into the mountains on their evening patrol.



What a wonderful sight, some of the rarest large raptors in the world.

Tejon Mountains, California
May 2011

There are many many deeply disturbing things about Las Vegas.

But none so disturbing as this.

It's a slot machine.

Fine, you might say. People need the dopamine hit that gambling gives them, stimulating them into addiction and degradation. But there are many slot machines, chewing many millions of dollars each day.

That may well be true. But there are none as bad as this one.

They all have names. Xerces. Village People Party. Chainsaws and Toasters. Duck Stamp.

But none have names like this one.

This is possibly the worst pun in the history of gaming.

Let me show it you...



Kitty Glitter.

Kitty Glitter? And so I ask you this: do we as a civilisation now have any right to exist?

I suspect not.

I wasn't really planning to go and watch the final launch of Discovery.

Honest.

But I found myself walking out of the conference centre at just after three this afternoon, skipping the final session and jumping in my rental car. I knew the traffic was bad, and with just over an hour to the launch I was probably kidding myself that I'd make it all the way to Titusville and the Space Coast. As it was I made it a lot further than I expected, following the lines of traffic down the 528 to just short of the Titusville turnoff. That final five minute hold while they got the Eastern Range computers online helped, but with only a 10 minute launch window the shuttle had to go or wait another day.

Everyone else on the road was pulling off onto the verge, and a hundred car radios relayed the final seconds of the countdown as we all looked to the northeast. There was nothing for a while, and then a rising cloud of white topped with light as the shuttle rose above the trees. Twenty miles or so away it was clear and so very close in the bright Florida air.

I raised my camera and clicked away.







That last image is cropped in to show the bright white of the shuttle main engines burning at the edge of the atmosphere. The two orange lights are the solid rocket boosters falling away just after separation, their engine heat fading away as they drop behind on their long fall home.

An awesome experience.

Only two more launches to go. I doubt I'll get the chance to see them, so I am very glad I made the pilgrimage this afternoon. And that I endured the nearly six hour journey back...