We had a beautiful weekend featuring warmer weather and gorgeous food days. As we were strolling down the road with the puppies this evening, I turned around to capture this image of our little castle in the fading daylight under a waxing gibbous moon. Click on the image to enlarge.
Now that the Christmas season is over for the year, I retired the poinsettias and holly from the mailbox and replaced them with a nice spring mix of daisies and sunflowers. After all, it will be spring soon enough and we want to get in the mood for it. Click on the image to enlarge.
I took a pair of images of our courtyard a couple of month back in an attempt to get a three-dimensional anaglyph image. Using a couple of software tools, I merged the two images into this red/cyan monochrome 3D image. I had to render it in “shades of gray” because our house is too red and the sky is too blue for comfortable viewing using a red/cyan color image.
I cropped one of the image pairs to render the color 2D version at the left. As you can see, the sky is very blue and the house is Sedona red. Also, the flowers in the garden are red and yellow.
Click on either image to enlarge.
Of course, you will need your free pair of 3D glasses to view the anaglyph image
I went out back and climbed up the little hill where we keep the bird feeders. I took the finch feeders up that Verna just filled up. When I was just ten feet away from the feeders after hanging them, the first goldfinch showed up. He was followed by several other goldfinches and house finches a short time later. Click on the image to enlarge.
This is one of many tiny blossoms on our lemon tree. I think that there may be winter lemons from this tree if the freeze doesn’t take them out. We will be covering the tree in the morning in anticipation of forecast frost tomorrow night. Click on the image to enlarge.
During the fall and winter months, the sky is frequently covered with high, thin cirrus clouds. At that high altitude, clouds are mostly composed of ice crystals which act as little prisms to refract sunlight. A couple of days ago, the sun was surrounded by a halo demonstrating this effect. I took a picture of the phenomenon using our big saguaro cactus to block the direct sunlight. Click on the image to enlarge.
