A large storm system made its way across the central East Coast today. I heard reports of almost 70 mph gusts in Pennsylvania. A severe thunderstorm watch was issued for central Virginia, but the storm hasn’t (yet?) materialized. The upside was the awesome sunset from the variable cloud cover. I snapped a few shots throughout while writing my lecture:
I just got back from the New River Gorge. Aleya and I met Mike and several other folks from Ohio on Friday night. After a bit of a noisy night (me snoring and a goat-guarding-dog continuously barking), we woke up around 8:30, made breakfast and headed towards Beauty Mountain. On the way we stopped at the upper end of “Endless” and warmed up at the “Guide’s Area”. I led Guide’s Left again, and was happy to find I was much more comfortable on it than i was the last time I’d done it. Improvement!
After the warmup, we headed over to “The Brain” at Beauty Mountain. Finding the climbs we were interested in to be already taken, we relaxed a bit and ate lunch. In a short while, the parties moved on and we climbed “Brain Teasers”, “Brain Tweezers”, and “You Want it, You Got it”. I gave the last one a go on lead, falling twice above the 3rd bolt.. It was a fun climb.. something to work on when I come back.
We capped off the day by climbing up The Pinnacle to watch the Sunset… rapping off as the light faded, we called it a night and headed into town for “Pies and Pints”
Today dawned slowly… without a plan, we woke at our own pace. With rain moving in, we opted to relax in town. A bit of hanging out at the gear store and watching the “Earth Day” events pretty much summed it up. We headed back to town early, which gave me ample time to put gear away, and (hopefully soon) get to bed on time!
Took a quick break from studying to close the shades here at home, and noticed this gorgeous sunset. Shot was taken from the middle floor, out the window using a Canon 20D.
Lots of recent sunset pictures, I know. But they’re just too good to pass up! I took this one in a series of a couple as the colors changed. I went down to the lake near my house and set up on the shore for some long exposures. The water was a bit choppy, but a few seconds enabled me to smooth out the ripples to get nice reflections of the clouds.
The before and after pictures are also on my flickr page.
Last night was the semi-annual Fan Mountain Public Night held by the University of Virgina’s Astronomy Department. As you can see from this picture of sunset (with the RRRT in the foreground), it was rather cloudy. Fortunately it cleared up for a little while, enabling the 40″ and 31″ telescopes to look at Saturn and M3.
I helped guide tours of the 40″, and it was quite nice. Everyone seemed very interested in the telescopes, especially the many kids who were there.
We were planning to observe some galaxies in the near-infrared using UVa’s FanCam NIR Imager after the public night. However, it clouded back over while we were putting the camera back on the telescope and were ultimately unable to make any observations. Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes! We’ll try again next week…
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