I’ve added some photographs from my trip to Bryce Canyon National Park in September 2001. Rachelle and I spent a week visiting National Parks and Monuments in southern Utah and Northern Arizona. Bryce Canyon was our first stop.
I plan to continue adding photos of my older trips as well as adding some pictures from my more recent trips.
I have added the Flash Photoblog World Map 1.2 to my photos section. The map indicates the locations on a world map where the various places I’ve taken photographs are found.
The map requires the Macromedia Flash Player, which is freely available from Macromedia’s website. The map itself was developed by Mark Zeman.
Okay, so I said that my photos section wasn’t going to be a true photoblog; that I wasn’t going to post a photo every day. But I experimented last night with low-light photography, and took some photos of a couple of candles. So I’ve gone ahead and posted the four I liked the most. And since there are four photos in the set, it is still not a true photoblog.
I’ve added a photos section to my blog to highlight my photography. The inaugural post is A Day in the Everglades, which I published a while back, but I liked the photos and — well — I needed something to start with.
It isn’t a true photoblog; I won’t be publishing a new photo every day. I intend for it to serve more as a travelogue to share some of the great places I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to visit. The entries are featured in the left-hand sidebar, and I’ve gone ahead and enabled comments and trackbacks on the individual posts.
I should also have mentioned that the photos section has its own Atom/RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to those as well as the feeds for my main blog or excursions, my sideblog.
NASA has released the first photographs of Titan’s surface taken by the Huygens probe.
Composite of Titan’s Surface Seen During Descent
Image Credit: ESA/NASA/Univ. of Arizona
First Color View of Titan’s Surface
Image Credit: ESA/NASA/Univ. of Arizona
And here’s a link to some audio files of Huygens’ descent and landing.
PoliBlog also has a link to an AP story and slideshow with more images. Rueters has a story on the landing.
Here are my previous posts on this subject.
The Huygens probe was successfully launched from the Cassini spacecraft on Christmas Day.
Cassini used springs to gently push the 705-pound probe away late Friday at a rate of one foot per second, sending it on a three-week free-fall toward Titan. Cassini will make a course change next week to avoid following the probe into the moon’s atmosphere.
The probe’s successful launch from Cassini put smiles on the faces of scientists in the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
“This was a big one partly because we had to do this right or no mission at all,” said David Southwood, the European Space Agency’s science program director.
A detailed analysis of the release was under way, but there were no indications of any problems, said Earl Maize, the Cassini deputy program manager at JPL. “We are quite confident we had a very clean release,” he said.
Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to have a significant atmosphere. Rich with nitrogen and containing about 6 percent methane, the atmosphere is 1 1/2 times thicker than Earth’s.
The Huygens probe will arrive at Titan on January 14, 2005, where it will begin a 2 1/2 hour descent through Titan’s murky atmosphere before landing on the surface of Saturn’s mysterious moon. I posted about the Cassini mission to Saturn earlier this month, including some amazing images captured by the spacecraft’s cameras. The following photo was taken on Christmas Day.
Cassini’s Holiday Greetings
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Here is an image of the Huygens probe (closeup view) that was taken about 12 hours after the launch. (From UnSpace)
For some images that are truly out of this world, check out the multimedia gallery on NASA’s Cassini-Huygens website. Below I’ve posted a few of my favorites, although there are many, many more spectacular images.
Dione and Saturn
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Nature’s Canvas
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Titan’s Many Layers
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
CNET News.com has more information on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons.
UPDATE: James Joyner has posted a link to the European Space Agency’s Cassini-Huygens site with more information on the Huygens probe which will be deployed from the Cassini orbiter on December 25 and begin its 22 day journey to Titan.
While my wife and I were visiting my folks in South Florida for Thanksgiving, we spent some time at Everglades National Park. We went to Shark Valley on the northern edge of the park, which gets its name from the Shark River Slough, a broad watery plain, which drains into the Shark River. Water from Lake Okeechobee flows through this area from the north-northeast to the southwest into Florida Bay. The Shark River Slough is commonly called “the river of grass”, for the tall sawgrass marsh which covers the Florida limestone. Shark Valley features a 15 mile loop road, open to hiking and bicycling, and a tram tour of the loop.
The Red-shouldered Hawk is the most common hawk found in the Everglades.
The Great White Heron is a tropical wading bird related to the Great Blue Heron, and in North America is most often found in South Florida. Great Egrets are found throughout the world. The North American subspecies can be found as far north as Southern Canada. [Note: I originally misidentified this bird. See this comment for details.]
Examples of designing with typography
Creating a flower icon with a gradient between different colors
Changes in the forthcoming version of WordPress
Using the WordPress 2.7 comment enhancements in a theme
Google App Engine tool for sanitizing user-submitted html
Getting IE VirtualPC images to run in VMWare and VirtualBox
