Before and After - Shoveling Panoramas

The view out of the garage before (click picture for panorama) ...


...and after shoveling (click picture for panorama).


It was only 5 inches on the driveway as I measured it.


So it wasn't as dramatic as farther east but it looks real pretty. Today's winds were powerful and rattled the house. Some children lost a ball onto the frozen Shellpot Creek, probably because of the wind.

It made it down the creek to our section and they fished it out safely.

Roses in the snow

The last of the fall roses dried on the stem now have to contend with snow.

Boxing Day snow photos

It's going to snow for a long time today and tonight and we are supposed to end with 12 inches. Here are some starting photos of the excitement.


Shellpot Creek downstream.

Shellpot Creek Waterfall.


The lonely snowy swingset.

More to come.

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse

Above is the sequence of the best pictures I took last night when I stayed up late to capture the first lunar eclipse on a winter solstice in almost 400 years.

I had hopes of taking pictures from inside the sunroom through the skylights but I realized they were dirty and I would have to clean them. Unfortunately I out it off until nighttime and so I was out on the roof with the windex freezing on the skylights trying to get them clean. I finally needed to get a hair dryer to remelt the cleaner with a towel to wipe it off. I shouldn't have bothered. Below is an example of the moon through the skylights with bright wings on either side.


Thus I ended up going outside to get the best pictures. It was cold so I had a fire going in the fireplace to warm up after each trip. I have been wrestling mightily with how to get the correct exposure on my crappy 8 MP Kodak camera, which is not a DSLR. I don't feel I deserve a real camera until I learn to take care of this one, and true to form I almost dropped it last night as well.

It seems like it is impossible to take a good picture of the full moon with this camera, I need to find a way to reduce the exposure way down, even as the camera thinks I need a high one because most of the field of vision is dark. I also struggled with having the camera focus on infinity, I finally had some luck with the distant setting, a little mountain icon on the camera. To be honest, once the eclipse was at its darkest I had a good amount of luck by just setting the exposure to a really long time to capture the dark red of the fully eclipsed moon. below is a closeup of an 8 second exposure, distant focus, lens zoomed and then I digitally zoomed and cropped it for this photo. It is the best shot.



I realized that for these long exposures that I was actually getting a good image of the stars around the eclipsed moon as well. So I tried to capture some constellations and the moon. Below are two shots with the moon at upper right, Orion at lower left and light pollution from Wilmington to the southwest at the bottom near the horizon.



I even got the Big dipper in this shot. Click for larger to see.

With my new success with the 8 second exposure to see stars I may try this again at the next new moon.

Freezing Shellpot Creek Video

This morning it was about 25F. The creek has been trying to freeze these past few days but it is actually still relatively flowing due to last weeks rain. The battle between water flow and below freezing temperatures has produced interesting ice spray on the rocks of the water fall. The creek also flows under the ice.

Christmas lights are on the tree

Finally put lights on the tree last night. Had some help from Linus who magically fixed a set that was one third out that I could not get to relight.

We are using the multicolored lights on the tree this year. I think it makes it the tree look a little retro. Next step ornaments!

SANDART Delaware license plate

Either this person with the SANDART Delaware license plate likes to put colored sand in bottles or they which is cool, or they like to build giant sand castles at the beach which might be cooler.

Perhaps they make giant colored sand paintings on the ground. The ephemerality of such work is vey deep and poignant.

Fig newton fan in Delaware?

The Delaware owner of this FIGNEWT license plate is perhaps expressing their love of fig newtons to the world.

Toad Lily on the Shellpot Creek

I thought I had lost this toad lily twice this year due to Shellpot Creek flooding and overflowing its banks. It seems to have done just fine and has some pretty wildly spotted flowers.

Ghostbusters Quiz

Mental Floss has a quiz on Ghostbusters, which has lately been on cable, so I felt really prepared. Some of the questions were not trivia from the film, they were trivia about the making of the film, which is unfair in a quiz purporting to see how much of the film you remember. I got a 90%.

Take it yourself here.

(via Mental Floss, via Neatorama)

Are they really POFOLK?

This family better be extreme fans of Edgar Allen Poe or enthusiasts of a river in Europe, because I don't know how poor you can be driving around a BMW SUV X5.

This POFOLK Delaware license plate seen during my travels. Are there other interpretations?

Shellpot Creek just starting to fill up from the rain - video

Shellpot Creek is only just getting started today. If Tropical Storm Nicole drops the 2 to 4 inches expected then this creek will rise higher.



The rain will be good to flush out the creek anyway. We just don't need a flood of the backyard like earlier in the summer.

US Religious Knowledge Survey and Quiz

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a new survey of religious knowledge on Tuesday. From the summary:

"Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education."

There is a quiz you can take to test your religious knowledge. I got 15 our of 15 even with the last question being a very difficult one that I didn't quite know the answer to, but I knew the subject matter so I was able to eliminate answers that couldn't have been correct. The average on the quiz is 50%, which I think is abysmal. Results of quizzes for 3412 nationally representative adults are below.

When I reviewed the number correct for different religious affiliations I realized that people were not even getting the 33% correct that would be expected from random guessing. This means people think their incorrect answers are the right answers for the questions. Are they being taught incorrectly? That needs to be fixed. It might be important to know that a country is predominantly Muslim or the religious holidays of a group that has a disproportionate affect on foreign policy.

Why doesn't Pew ever call me? After the poll they should tell the people the correct answers so they learn something.

Measuring Shellpot Creek Stream Flow with a Leaf

Before today's rain, the Shellpot Creek has been so low due to the lack of rain that it has contracted down to flowing through a few inch wide cleft in the rocks on the stream bed in the middle of the picture below.

Here is the cleft:

The width is about 3.25 inches:


The depth is 2 inches, the ruler I used goes to 16 inches on the right side and 14 inches is just visible below.


I realized that such a controlled situation would allow me to measure the stream flow with a ruler and something like a leaf floating in the water to get the flow velocity of the surface. I used my camera and flip video to capture the measurements and as a timer for the flow. I repositioned the ruler and used an imaginary line drawn from the cleft in the rock to the ruler edge. This distance is 5.25 inches. I then used the flip video snapshot function to find the exact frame the leaf first crosses the imaginary line at the cleft in the rock and the exact frame the leaf just touches the ruler at the other end (leaf and red lines below).


There are 30 frames/second in the video. I got 10 successful measurements from 14 leaf drops, ranging from 23 frames to 40 frames, corresponding to an average of 5.59 inches/second +/s 15% for the velocity of the leaf and thus for the velocity of the top of the water.

I pieced them all together in the following video.

Without doing the extra work that would be required given the fluid mechanics of the situation we are going to assume that the channel is rectangular and that I have measured the maximum velocity of the fluid. That corresponds to the right hand side of the chart below.

If we assume a linear velocity profile the average velocity is 5.59 inches/sec multiplied by a 2 inch depth and a 3.25 in width to get 36.3 cubic inches/sec for the flow. In reality the velocity profile is more parabolic like the right hand side of the diagram above and the average velocity is higher. Also, the channel is not smooth on the sides or the bottom, because of pebbles and stones and even the cross section will not be regular. Close examination of the video of the leaves floating by shows that they often go fast on the right hand side of the flow of the creek and slower on the left hand side, giving another clue that the velocity profile isn't simple.

Thus I feel like I have measured more of a lower bound for the flowrate. What would my readers do differently?

Name the ten largest cities in Pennsylvania - quiz

Mental Floss has a quiz to name the ten largest cities in Pennsylvania in 5 minutes. No choices you just have to type them in. I only got 8, though the quiz declares that anything over 6 would be considered a win. The stats when I took it said that of 1542 people took it with an average score of 53%.

As a former Pennsylvanian who is from the Philadelphia area but went to Pittsburgh for college, I should have gotten all ten. I have been to the eastern one of the two I missed. The other was in the west. Good Luck.

Take the quiz here.

How well can you do?

Polar Bear Swimming at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago

We went to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago as part of our vacation in August. This Polar bear was having a cooler time than us swimming in the pool of his enclosure.



Except for the fact that he would have eaten me, I would have jumped in there with him.

Caterpillars eating a sunflower

I am not sure what species these caterpillars are, but they seem to love eating the petals on the lone sunflower out in the front garden.

I think the sunflower is a second or third generation of seeds from flowers from earlier seeds we planted a few years ago. usually the groundhog snips them off before they get to grow.

Mosaic of stars at the Chicago Stained Glass Museum

While on vacation we visited the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows on Navy Pier on Chicago. They also had an exhibit of mosaics. This mosaic, "When the Star Line Up For You", by Yulia Hanensen of Baltimore, Maryland in 2009 is made of smalti, coal, glass and gold. It was very beautiful in person and the straight on picture captures some of it, but the stars were three dimensional and bulged out of the mosaic. The picture below from the side captures some of the effect.

I would love this for my home.

Cell Phone Camera Photo Essay: Tunnels From Pittsburgh to Harrisburg

I happened to take a picture of each of the tunnels we traveled through yesterday from the Pittsburgh Airport Marriott where we stayed east to Harrisburg where we got off of the Pennsylvania turnpike to begin the southeastern slog to Delaware. As a bonus we took I376 through Pittsburgh so we got two extra tunnels to make up for the fact that we didn't drive hundreds of miles out of our way to go through the Lehigh tunnel, which is on the Northeastern Extension (I476), and definitely not on the way home to Delaware.

Fort Pitt Tunnel.

Fort Pitt Bridge, and Pittsburgh.

More Fort Pitt Bridge, and Pittsburgh.

Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

Some cool wind turbines near Somerset, PA.

Allegheny Mountain.

Some cool and huge electrical equipment on a truck.

Tuscarora Mountain.

Approaching Kittatinny Mountain.
Kittatinny Mountain.

Blue Mountain.

Kittatinny Mountain and Blue Mountain are the double tunnels on the turnpike west of Harrisburg. You leave one and immediately enter the next.

After these tunnels we traveled over the Susquehanna river bridge which is not visually interesting, though the river below and the view of Three Mile Island is. However the best photography would come from stopping and taking a picture which would be too dangerous.

If you have a favorite tunnel from this photo essay, please comment.

Lifesaving sign for the alphabet road game

We play the alphabet game when travelling sometimes. You must find a word on a sign or somewhere on the road that begins with each letter of the alphabet. Vehicles and buildings and generally anything but what is in our own car are allowed. We allow a one letter pass, but still you always risk getting stuck at Q or Z. That's why this sign would come in handy.

The post doesn't say where this is. Technically we would need to see words starting with these letters and at the correct time in the sequence, so I would need four of these signs. Daury Queen can help with the q, as can a Quit Smoking billboard. We allow the Nissan Xterra for X, and that car brand also supplies the very helpful Nissan Quest. I have never seen a xylophone sale on a billboard so X is usually my pass letter.

(via Neatorama, via The Litter Box)

Fayette Panorama

I took pictures of the harbor at Fayette on Fayette Day and stitched them together using Hugin. This is the resulting panorama.

It was a beautiful day for it.

Here are some more pictures of Fayette.

The Schooner Madeline.

Inside the beehive coker.


The beehive coker.


The smelters.