A Red Dragon is Eating the Moon

[melannen]

Liveblogging the 2010 North American Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse. :D Lat 39 N, Long 76 W

Some notes of art: to follow the everybody-can-to-it theme of this community, these pictures were all taken in a suburban yard with a cheap EasyShare digital camera and no extra equipment. ...as a result, though, these images are really not a very good equivalent of what was visible through the naked eye - I had very limited ability to adjust exposure times and focal depth, so the short-exposure shots are far too dimmed out ( you could see a disc for almost the whole course of the eclipse) and the long-exposure shots are far too bright ( the slivers, especially, look much bigger in the photos than they did through eyes.) And, of course, in general it's much less sharp and I lost detail. But I am not going to say they aren't accurate, because a creature with eyes like an EasyShare camera would have seen pretty much this. :P

( approx. 1:45 AM )

( approx. 2:00 AM )

( approx. 2:15 AM )

( approx. 2:23 AM )

( approx. 2:30 AM )

( approx. 2:35 AM )

( approx. 2:35 AM, noflash )

( approx. 2:40 AM )

( approx. 2:45 AM )

(2:45 -> near-totality, break to thaw and post pictures.)

( approx. 3:15 AM )

(3:15 -> totality, break for fresh pomegranate and old brandy)

( approx. 3:45 AM )

( approx. 4:00 AM )

( approx. 4:15 AM )

-->4:30 AM Bed.

Visitors to the garden

[lark_ascends]

We had a visitor in our garden yesterday, a snake. I live in Sydney, Australia, so it's lovely summer (although it's actually been coolish the last two mornings and some areas of southern Australia got snow, go figure!). My parents spotted the snake's head coming out of the garden near our door, and when they tried to chase it away it disappeared somewhere into the wilds of our garden. Since later finding its shed skin, we know that it's a tree snake (its skin was up in a tree!) and so completely harmless. Considering how wild our garden is, we don't know how long it had been living here.

Anyway, it got me thinking about visitors in the garden or on your balcony (visiting you, really)--unusual ones, unwanted ones, ones that you love the most. So, comm members, what are yours?

We once had a goanna (big big lizard) try to make friends with our rabbit that lived in the bottom of a bird aviary, and the rabbit didn't realise that the goanna could very well eat it. We've also got brush turkeys that come out of the local bush and wander through gardens--we don't want one taking up residence in ours, thank you very much! My favourite visitor to the garden is the butcher bird. They have the most gorgeous song and can imitate other birds. Here's an example of part of their song.