In early December, I headed to San Francisco for the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.  While most of my time was spent at the conference, I did find time to catch up with friends who live far away and see some of the sights of San Francisco.


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My family’s border collie, Crash, died yesterday.  He was about three months shy of his 16th birthday.  We got Crash when I was 14.  When we went to go look at the litter and pick out our puppy, all the puppies were bouncing off the walls and running around like crazed, energy-filled border collies tend to do.  This one puppy, however, was lying ( Read more... )

Eve had not had pictures taken with her husband and kids in quite a while and wanted to give prints as Christmas presents to her family.  I met them at Bay Area Park about an hour before sunset one Saturday in late October to take their portraits.  We first had the kids run around the playground to get some energy out, and I took some fun candids ( Read more... )

Every year, NASA Johnson Space Center hosts a hot air balloon festival. The balloons launch from another location and land in a giant field on the JSC campus shortly after sunrise. They have contests for the pilots to throw things from their balloons trying to hit specific spots on the ground, and booths to visit. I like watching the balloons ( Read more... )

My friend Colleen had never seen The Nutcracker and always wanted to, so I got us tickets for her birthday.  We were seated in the lower balcony, so we had a view of the entire stage, as well as the pit orchestra!  The dancers were fantastic and the music was phenomenal.  We had a great time, and Colleen got me a Nutcracker ornament to commemorate ( Read more... )

The last stop on our teacher workshop field trip before heading back to Phoenix was Sunset Crater National Monument, a cindercone volcano in northern Arizona.  When we were leaving the park, we caught a gorgeous view of the sun peaking through the monsoon clouds and shining on the San Francisco Peaks.  As we drove out of Flagstaff, the sky beneath ( Read more... )

While on the teacher workshop field trip in northern Arizona, one of our stops was a cindercone volcano called SP Crater.  When we arrived at the cone, the sky was blue with a few puffy clouds.  We spent less than an hour climbing around collecting cinders and lava bombs before gathering at the bottom to discuss what we had found.

About that time, ( Read more... )

One of the stops on the teacher workshop field trip in Arizona was Meteor Crater (or Barringer Crater).  Meteor Crater was formed when a meteorite about 150 feet across made mostly of iron and nickel metal slammed into the northern Arizona desert, creating a hole about a mile wide.  At 50,000 years old, it is one of the youngest impact craters on ( Read more... )

While trying to create another variation of the below panorama, I either added or neglected to put in a photo that seriously confused the autostitching program I was using, AutoPano.  AutoPano generally does a great job at creating panoramas, stretching and tilting the photos, and correcting any lens distortion and color variations to make a ( Read more... )

During the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter teacher workshop I helped teach at Arizona State University in August, we took a field trip to visit some craters in northern Arizona - two volcanoes and an impact crater.  Meteor Crater, or Barringer Crater, is located about 35 miles east of Flagstaff.  Because of the arid environment and its young age (~50, ( Read more... )