International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN) 2011 is on Saturday, October 8! The goal of InOMN is to engage lunar science and education communities, amateur astronomers, space enthusiasts, and the general public in annual lunar observation campaigns that share the excitement of lunar science and exploration. Join an event near you, or create your own!
In preparation of LPI’s event at the George Observatory, I took our Celestron 8-inch telescope home to make sure it was in good working order. While I had it out on my patio, I connected my Canon 7D and got a few nice pictures of the first quarter moon. The field of view is small enough that it takes at least two photos, stitched together, to show the entire surface of the moon.
Close-up of the terminator (line between day and night), Mare Serenitatus (top dark area), Mare Tranquilitatus (middle dark area), and Mare Crisium (small dark area on the bottom right)
I traveled to the Phoenix area to help facilitate a teacher workshop about the Moon last month. I stayed with a couple of awesome friends of mine from grad school (hi Beck and Thijs!) for a few days before the workshop. They have a fabulous pool that we spent the hot summer nights relaxing in, and a bunch of different cacti and succulents. These are a few of my favorites.
One of the things I really wanted to show Sam when I took her to Austin for the 4th of July was the bats. Austin has the largest urban population of Mexican free-tailed bats in the world; the boat tour guide said there were 800,000 bats this year! They live under the Congress Avenue bridge over Ladybird Lake downtown. They fly out in swarms at sunset during the warmer months to eat, and you can take a boat out on the lake to watch. Sam and I went on Capital Cruise‘s bat boat tour and were treated to the best show they had had all summer. Below are pictures of the skyline at sunset, a yellow-crowned night heron (that feeds on baby bats and thus hangs out around the bridge), and the bats! The video shows several swarms of bats flying out from under the bridge, over the treeline, and down the lake. It’s amazing to see, so if you’re ever in Austin during the summer, you should definitely go check out the bats!
When my friend Sam and I were in Austin, she wanted to go on a bat boat tour on the lake. We got there early to make sure to get a good seat and had some time to kill, so we wandered around on the hike and bike trail. It’s a nice trail right by the water with lots of plants and birds to watch. We saw a mama cardinal feeding a baby in the bushes!
The State Capitol Building in Austin is an impressive building made of pink granite from the Texas Hill Country. I took Sam there to wander around at sunset one of the nights we were in town for the 4th of July.
A friend of mine, Sam, was in Houston from Canada for work right before the 4th of July. I took her with me when I headed to Austin for the holiday weekend. One of our stops was The Oasis, a restaurant built into the side of the limestone cliffs overlooking Lake Travis. Sam, Sara, and I had dinner and watched the sun set over the lake. It was beautiful but blazing hot!
When I went to Austin for the 4th of July, we stopped in at County Line BBQ on Lake Austin. It’s fantastic BBQ and has a deck out on the lake where you can feed the turtles! Below are a few that were especially friendly. They were adorable!
Sometimes it’s fun to play with focus to see what you can get when things aren’t perfectly sharp. This one is of sunrise in Galveston. I like the warm colors and the softness of the shapes.
I love Galveston in the early morning. An hour or so before sunrise, everything is still, and then slowly all the birds wake up and the wind picks up and the waves get stronger. The seagulls start flying around aimlessly and squawking, the little sand birds scurry around on the ground, and the pelicans fly in groups of 5-10 rarely flapping their wings but instead just soaring, sometimes up above everything but sometimes just barely skimming the water. It’s peaceful and gorgeous.
A couple of months ago, a cat outside my apartment had four kittens. One of them refused to eat and didn’t make it past a couple of weeks. The other three grew and played with each other. Mama cat stayed with them. Two of the kittens didn’t want anything to do with people and ran whenever I got near them. One kitten, however, loved people and came scrambling over whenever I came by.
She was very curious and liked to go exploring by herself, while the other two kittens seemed to like to play together and didn’t really seem to care about anything else. Since the adventurous kitten loved exploring so much, I started calling her Darwin. One day I noticed she was sneezing and her eyes were all matted. I took her to the vet and it turned out she had a respiratory infection but, other than that, she was perfectly healthy, and only weighed 0.15 pounds (!!). She was tiny. The vet was surprised at how sweet she was and how much she liked people because she marched right up to him as soon as he came in the room. Most cats from the outside are afraid of people and will run from them. I got antibiotics and eye drops for her. Every morning before work and every night before bed I took her over to the stairs that led up to my apartment, put her on my lap, and gave her the meds. She took the oral antibiotics like a champ but hated the eye drops. She’d fight me and squeak her tiny meow but would eventually let me apply them. Then she’d usually fall asleep in my lap. Sometimes, if her mom was nearby, she wanted to go see her and jump on her and try to attack her tail. She loved her mom.
I wanted so badly to bring her inside but I thought I should wait for her to reach six weeks, since she was still nursing and I didn’t want to take her away from her mom too early. I made an appointment to have her checked out at the vet (I wanted to make sure she didn’t have anything that she could give to Kepler and Apollo, the two cats I already have.) for Saturday, July 9th. Two weeks ago on Friday morning, July 8th as I was leaving my apartment to go to work, I found my little explorer in the parking lot. She had been hit by a car. And it crushed me. I just needed one more day and then she would have been inside, where it’s safe, for the rest of her life. The only thing that was damaged was her head; her body was perfectly fine, so I’m guessing she went quickly. She was so sweet and soft and pretty and smart, and I don’t understand why it had to be her.
My neighbor Rich had been helping care for the mama cat and the kittens, and he was upset, too. He and I buried Darwin under a tree, near our building – a tree she kept trying to climb, but she was too small. I topped her grave with a bundle of the long grass that she loved to play in. You shouldn’t ever have to bury something that’s only six weeks old.
I miss her. I miss her soft fur; she was going to have long hair like Kepler. I wanted to see her grow up. She grew so much in the few weeks I knew her. I wanted to see what color her eyes were going to be. She and Apollo would have been best friends; they’d be constantly chasing each other around the apartment. I miss her spotted little belly. How incredibly small she was. The way she’d fall asleep in an instant with her head lolling back and her mouth opening just enough to see her little tongue. And when she slept, she slept hard; it was almost impossible to wake her. She was adorable and everyone she met fell in love with her instantly. She was a very special kitten. I just thought we’d have more time together.
Most of the pictures and all of the video I took of her were with my iPhone. Below and in the video are my favorites.
