One of the things I had wanted to do on vacation was film a hummingbird in slow-motion. Alas, I did not see any visiting the feeder I set up . Our condo was not situated in a good spot; location, location, location.
However, I thought I had hit the jackpot while out geocaching one day, when I stopped to film some butterflies and bees pollinating some flowers. It looked like a small hummingbird.
This is probably a hummingbird clearwing moth, Hemaris thysbe.
Gorgeous first two-thirds of the Labor Day weekend, which I spent geocaching, up to the point where my knee started complaining about all the hiking. Off-trail bushwhacking seems to be the main irritant, along with hilly trails, and i was doing a lot of that on Sunday. The knee seems to wait until I’ve maximized the distance back to the car before starting to hurt, and this time was no exception. So I’m back in front of a computer screen, digging up interesting (to me) science stuff, and sorting through my slo-mo movies, getting things ready to go.
I was browsing the web and ran across this Gigapixel image of downtown Vancouver. I used to live there — not downtown, since my postdoc salary wouldn’t support that — but I opened it to see if I recognized the area. And I did, but not from when I lived there. I went to a conference there a few years ago, and went geocaching in the mornings as my internal clock ensured that I was always awake by 5 AM. Went out and about and got back by 7, in time to get ready for the morning sessions. There’s a geocache hidden in that gazebo-like structure. The picture was taken from a bridge, and from the photographer’s perspective, the hockey/basketball venue is to the right and a little behind.
Here it is on Google maps
Success!
The rough headcount for the Open House was about 9,000 visitors. This was the first one I had worked (there hadn’t been one of these since 2001) and the expectation from the earlier events was that we could get “a few thousand” people, so I’d have to say that we exceeded expectations. The weather was absolutely gorgeous for early April — mid 60s and literally no clouds. There was some wind early in the afternoon, but even that minor annoyance died down.
We got a lot of traffic at the geocaching table. A fellow geocacher helped out (and a few others came to visit and nab the “puzzle” geocache located at the Observatory); we chatted with people and explained the activity to the adults. For the kids, it was more interactive — I handed them a GPS receiver and walked them through the cache finds: a fake rock and a film container, with log books in them. The areas open to the public weren’t conducive to larger caches, and there was no budget for trade items (or give-aways, in this case). But with the response we got from this event, maybe there will be an opportunity for a more elaborate activity next year.
I didn’t get a chance to check out the other presentations (though I had seen several of the posters; a network issue prevented several people from “seeing” our plotter, so they sent me files and had me print them) I know the lines were long for the “big” telescopes, and there were more than a dozen amateur astronomers who set up scopes (some more than one) for viewing. The sun (sans spots) during the day, and then whatever was up at night. I arrived at 1 for some setup work and left around 9, which is when they were going to close the gates, and there was still a considerable line of people waiting to get in. Not sure if they stayed open later than the planned 10 PM. It would have been disappointing to close down before everyone got a chance to look through a few telescopes, but security makes the call on things like that.
The best part about all of this was the kids. You could tell that some had been dragged there, but for the most part they were very engaged and enthusiastic. The ones who did the geocache finds were, and I heard some very positive, spontaneous comments from them in the area where the telescopes were set up. When I was returning some GPS receivers to Geoff, the PAO, the youngster stepping down from the telescope shouted out a very sincere, “I saw the MOON!” That’s worth the price of admission right there.
Here’s the view of the lawn where the small telescopes were set up.
Things got busier as it got dark, but flash photography tends to annoy people who want their eyes to be dark-adjusted, so I don’t have any pictures.
The weather this past weekend was very nice, so both afternoons were spent geocaching. Some bushwacking required.
Real-time satellite tracking ISS, GPS satellites, Hubble, etc. Even the shuttle when it’s up there.
via Kottke
Out geocaching this afternoon. First outing of the year where I did significant bushwhacking in shorts, so I have a start on a new set of scratches on my shins. And I landed hard jumping down from a bank while crossing a stream, so I have sore ankle too. Good times.
“Found it in the last tree I looked in”
That was one of the log entries. You never see, “Found it and kept looking a few more minutes.” OF COURSE it’s in the last place you looked!
(TNLNSL stands for “Took nothing, left nothing, signed log”)
I went out geocaching in the wonderful weather today. First stop was to check on caches I have placed, in response to a couple of emails from people who couldn’t find them. Sure enough, they had been muggled. One cache almost completely gone — only the lid and the logbook could be found. The second one was a multi-stage cache, and only stage one was missing. So it’s likely that these were discovered by accident and taken. Immature little … hippies.