I purloined this image from the FecesBook® thing. Our granddaughter decided to cut little Alex’s hair into a Mohawk and spike it with red dye for this shot. Badass Baby Great Grandson with tattoos and all. Click on the image to enlarge.
Bob
Mountain and Crater on Dwarf Planet Ceres in 3D
This image is cropped from a 3D Photo found on Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Get out your red/blue glasses and gaze across Ceres at mysterious mountain Ahuna Mons. Shown in a 3D anaglyph perspective view, the mosaicked image data was captured in December of 2015, taken from the Dawn spacecraft’s low-altitude mapping orbit about 385 kilometers above the surface of the dwarf planet. A remarkable dome-shaped feature on Ceres, with steep, smooth sides Ahuna Mons is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter at its base, rising on average 4 kilometers to a flattened summit. Similar in size to mountains found on planet Earth, no other Cerean surface feature is so tall and well-defined. It is not known what process shaped the lonely Ahuna Mons, or if the bright material streaking its steepest side is the same material responsible for Ceres’ famous bright spots.
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, UCLA, MPS/DLR/IDA
Ocotillo Fower Buds
Our neighbor, Tim, that lives across from us did a job last fall clearing some property for a construction project. Two of the victims of that clearing of natural desert vegetation were ocotillos that Tim brought for us to add to our xeriscape rock and cactus garden. We planted them at that time and today, we noticed that new flower pods are growing on the tips of the ‘canes’ of the ocotillos. This is very good news since the two of them went into shock and lost their green leaves a while after we planted them.
Now, we will see these flower pods grow and produce the little red and yellow flowers characteristic of the ocotillo. After that, the monsoons to come will likely restore the green leaves that these two lost over the winter months. Click on the image to enlarge.
Holy Saguaro
The cirrus clouds in front of the sun contained enough ice crystals to create this rainbow halo around the sun today here in Wickenburg. It was 82 degrees and an absolutely beautiful day.
I was photographing some work that we did in the rock and cactus garden this afternoon, when I noticed the solar halo. I walked over to the shadow of the big saguaro out front by the garage to get this shot. I adjusted the gamma shading and chromatic saturation of the image a bit to get this nice effect of a “divine saguaro.”
Hieroglyph Ridge
We have lived in our little house here in Wickenburg for just over five years now. Every day that the weather is clear, we can walk down to the road in front of the house, look east and we see this beautiful mountain ridge, located about 20 miles from us.
It is a ridge and mountain peak in the Hieroglyph Mountains and is the third of three ranges, the first being just east of town. The first range is covered with saguaro cacti, the second with more mountainous vegetation and the last ridge is mostly rocky. The colors are just beautiful, varying with the time of day and weather composition.
We love it here in our retirement house.
