Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

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

Lying back in the hotel pool tonight, after a long day of meetings, briefings and writing, I saw a line drawn across the clear night sky. Bright yellow, the colour of fire, it drew a ruler across the heavens from east to west, a bright flash that lasted a fraction of a second - more persistence of vision than anything else.

It wasn't fireworks from some theme park show, nor was it an airliner, or a rocket launch. This was the mark of a lump of space junk: a pebble, a handful of ice, or just a piece of rubbish thrown there by man. It doesn't matter what it was, it just matters what we call it.

A shooting star.

A fireball.

Or maybe we should just wonder at the beauty of the heavens, something we usually hide behind garish sodium vapours and bright tungsten.