Sunrise/Sunset/Sky

Easter Sunrise Service

Photograph taken on Sunday, April 20, 2025 by Henry
Easter Sunrise Service

Easter Sunrise Service

Dorothy and I are big fans of Easter sunrise services. In particular, we have gone to the Fourth Presbyterian Church Easter sunrise service pretty regularly for quite a few years. I’ve been to a few others, including one at a little Moravian church in south central Virginia that was quite nice. Cathy isn’t quite as big a fan, liking the service well enough but not so fond of having to get up at 5:00 AM to get to the church by 6:00. Once we’re there, she enjoys it well enough. Some years it’s been quite cold. Last year, with an early Easter (March 31) it was in the low 40s. Two years ago is was right around freezing. Three years ago, however (April 17, 2022), it was very cold.

Between the sunrise service and the first ‘regular’ service we all went to the upper room for breakfast, which is a nice time to visit with folks that we don’t see often (since this isn’t our church). The 8:00 AM service is always nice, especially in terms of the music, singing familiar Easter hymns (except one where they unaccountably changed it up on us) and with an orchestra. The service ends with the choir and congregation singing George Frideric Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, which after all these years I’m almost able to get through properly.

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Saturn

Photograph taken on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 by Henry
Saturn

Saturn

A few days ago we saw Saturn near the moon shortly after moonrise. Since then it’s moved a little ways from the moon. Or more precisely the moon has moved a ways relative to Saturn, since it is moving faster in relation to the earth’s rotation). In any case, I was able to get a pretty good shot of it with my long lens zoomed out to 600mm. This was taken at ISO 3200 at f/7.1 for 1/100 second. It isn’t going to win any awards for photos of planets but it’s at least good enough that you can be sure which planet it is.

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Sunset Over The Sisters

Photograph taken on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 by Henry
Sunset Over The Sisters

Sunset Over The Sisters

I wouldn’t normally post two sunset photos in a row, especially when they’re so similar, but I couldn’t resist posting this one. We went up onto Pilot Butte again in the evening (along with quite a few others and we were very lucky to find a parking spot). This is a three-shot panorama, taken with my 100mm lens, looking to the west over Broken Top on the left and then South, Middle, and North Sisters.

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Sunset, Bend, Oregon

Photograph taken on Monday, September 23, 2024 by Henry
Sunset, Bend, Oregon

Sunset, Bend, Oregon

We had a pretty spectacular sunset this evening. This panorama is stitched together from seven shots taken from in front of Brian and Lisa’s house, which faces west. The two peaks partially behind trees about a third the way from the left are Middle and North Sister. South Sister is hidden behind the tree on the far left.

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Tumalo State Park Sunset

Photograph taken on Monday, September 16, 2024 by Henry
Tumalo State Park Sunset

Tumalo State Park Sunset

We had a fairly quiet and restful day today. Lisa’s car is still in the shop, although we’re expecting that it will be ready to be picked up either tomorrow evening or the following morning. After dinner we drove to Tumalo State Park on the Deschutes River north (downstream) from downtown Bend. There were some substantial ponderosa pines and I showed Brian, Lisa, and Cathy that if you smell in the large crevices in the bark it smells like vanilla. Shortly after that we saw a sign that told about the pines and it mentioned the vanilla smell. In addition to the sunset photos, I took some HDR sets of the river which turned out pretty well, although if I had done it sooner they would have had more sunset colors in the sky, which would have improved them.

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The Moon

Photograph taken on Sunday, September 15, 2024 by Henry
The Moon

The Moon

We went up to Sisters today and walked around a farmers market. I bought some flank steak at the Sisters Meat Smokehouse, which I’ll fix in the next day or two. We also went up Pilot Butte in Bend, which is a nice place to get a view of the town and surrounding area. As for the surrounding area, it was fairly hazy and there were clouds so we couldn’t see the tops of Mount Bachelor or the Sisters. To the north we could see Mount Hood, although it looked a bit more like a dark cloud than the top of a mountain. Late in the evening we looked for Saturn, which was in the sky not too far from the moon. I got a few pictures where you can actually see that Saturn has rings, but they aren’t going to win any awards. This photo of the moon won’t, either, but I think it’s a nice shot, anyway.

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Clouds over Great Falls

Photograph taken on Sunday, August 18, 2024 by Henry
Clouds over Great Falls

Clouds over Great Falls

We went to Great Falls today. It’s one of those things we used to do fairly often but then didn’t quite so much when they started charging so much for parking. Now that I have my America The Beautiful Lifetime Senior pass, it doesn’t cost us any to get in. That was definitely a well spent $80. The sky was very dramatic while we were there, as seen in this photo taken from Olmsted Island looking southwest towards the Virginia shoreline. As you can probably tell, this is an HDR image, made from three separate exposures.

A little later, as we were walking on the canal towards Wide-Water, it started to rain. We got under the branches of a tree and I put my camera under my shirt and managed to keep it pretty dry, although we got fairly wet ourselves. The rain stopped and we continued on. By the time we turned around and got back to the car, the sun was shining again.

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Sunset (with Moon)

Photograph taken on Thursday, July 11, 2024 by Henry
Sunset with Moon

Sunset with Moon

Sunset

Sunset

We had a beautiful sunset this evening and had the bonus of there being a crescent moon in the southwestern sky. The first photo is to the southwest, showing the moon. The second it looking northwest over our next door neighbor’s house. We haven’t had a lot in the way of sunsets lately. That is, the sun has set once per day, as usual, but they haven’t been anything to look at, much less spectacular. But this evening it was really something.

The summer has been very hot, humid, with very little rain. Rainfall in June was only 48 percent of normal ranking among the 20 driest and the fifth hottest Junes on record for Maryland. We also tied our record for the greatest number of June days with a high of 90°F or higher with 14 days. With this sunset, though, I’m hoping things are changing and we’ll get some rain and some cooler weather (like with highs in the mid 80s) sometime soon, hopefully before September.

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Pennsylvania Sunset

Photograph taken on Saturday, May 25, 2024 by Henry
Pennsylvania Sunset

Pennsylvania Sunset

Cathy and I drove up to Pennsylvania late this morning to join Dorothy and some of her friends. Two of them had come up to work on their music bit and then after we came, they helped me plant four dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) and ten Fraser fir (Abies fraseri). There is already one Metasequoia that dad planted something like 50 years ago and we planted the new trees in that same area to hopefully produce a small grove eventually. The firs are planted as Christmas trees and the plan it to plant ten or so every year for a while and then perhaps every other year after that so that we have a good, constant source for our own Christmas tree. These were little plugs, only measuring four inches or so above ground, so it will be a few years before any of them are ready to be used.

In the evening I built a fire and started cooking dinner only to have a rainstorm put out my fire. After the rain I was able to get the fire going again and then proceeded to overcook dinner. But we ate it anyway. And we got this sunset, which was pretty nice.

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Partial Solar Eclipse

Photograph taken on Monday, April 08, 2024 by Henry
Partial Solar Eclipse

Partial Solar Eclipse

We had quite a few friends to traveled to various places on the path of totality to see the main event. We stayed home and took about 1.5 hours off from work to enjoy the partial solar eclipse. I set up my camera with my long lens zoomed out to 600mm and auto-focus turned off. I set the aperture to f/22 and the shutter speed to 1⁄8000 second. I wasn’t about to look through the camera at the sun, so turned on the LED screen to view the sun on that. Even with those settings, the sun was much too bright and I was unable to get even reasonably good photographs, except when light clouds darkened the sky enough. That happened early in the eclipse but by the time this photo was taken, the sky was clear. Even with only this small amount of the sun visible, it’s way too bright to look at unfiltered, even at those extreme camera settings.

By stacking two polarizing filters over the lens and turning them perpendicular to each other, I was able to reduce the light to an acceptable level. With the two filters perfectly perpendicular to one another, however, the image recorded was a deep blue color. By turning one of them ever so slightly the image turned white and that’s how it was set for this photo, taken a few minutes before the maximum solar coverage.

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Sunset

Photograph taken on Thursday, December 07, 2023 by Henry
Sunset

Sunset

As we near the winter solstice, it’s getting dark before I leave work, which is one of the things I like least about the winter. Still, it does mean that I’m more likely to see the sunset, as I’m not home and engrossed in some book or other. This was taken through the window of my office. Until last February my office window faced north so I rarely so the sunset directly through it. Now I face west, although, as you can see, there are trees along the back of the parking lot so the sunset is only seen through them. Still, pretty colors.

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Clouds At Sunset

Photograph taken on Friday, July 14, 2023 by Henry
Clouds At Sunset

Clouds At Sunset

We went for a walk at Redgate Park this evening and spent most of the walk on the phone with our friend Lisa. It was warm and muggy but good to be outdoors. When we first called, Lisa had been in the bank and was anxious to get out. Another customer was being very belligerent and she wanted to be somewhere else. We tLked abiut that and all sorts of ither things. We saw a few deer and lots if geese and then towards the end of the walk the clouds to the southeast of us were lit by the setting sun and turned an intense orange.

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Canadian Haze

Photograph taken on Thursday, June 08, 2023 by Henry
Canadian Haze

Canadian Haze

Wildfires in Canada have been producing some significant haze down the eastern seaboard the last couple days. While we haven’t had it nearly as bad as New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and southern New York, this morning our air quality index reached “code purple” which is the highest level. It was only at that level for about three hours and by the evening it was noticeably better. We could see it from out house, just looking to the end of the street but as we crossed Interstate 270 it was particularly apparent. After dropping Cathy off at her office, I went back and took some photos from the bridge.

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Sunset

Photograph taken on Thursday, May 25, 2023 by Henry
Sunset

Sunset

We were out at Anna and Greg’s for the bi-weekly worship night and there was a lovely sunset. The color was mostly down near the horizon so I took a few pictures with my 100mm lens. The photo presented here is a panorama made from two of those, stitched together with Hugin, a panorama photo stitcher (https://hugin.sourceforge.io/), that does a really good job and over the years has become more and more automated.

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Sunset

Photograph taken on Thursday, May 04, 2023 by Henry
Sunset

Sunset

We were out between Darnestown and Poolesville this evening for Dorothy’s Thursday Evening Worship, although Dorothy wasn’t there this week and we were led by Adam and Michael. It was a lovely, cool evening and the sun was going down as we started. I took a few pictures, including this one of the sunset. Not the most spectacular sunset in history, but pretty for all of that. We had a lovely time and naturally we stayed and visited with everyone afterward. I especially enjoyed talking with Michael about keeping aquarium fish, which it turns out we both do.

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Easter Sunrise Service

Photograph taken on Monday, April 10, 2023 by Henry
4th Presbyterian Church Easter Sunrise Service

4th Presbyterian Church Easter Sunrise Service

Sadly, I’m way behind posting my photos. I’m writing this on May 8, nearly a month late. I seem to get nearly caught up and then don’t manage to post for a while and I’m behind again.

Anyway, on Easter morning Cathy and I went to the Easter Sunrise Service at Fourth Presbyterian. It’s one of my favorite things and Cathy is nice enough to be willing to get up before 5:00 AM to get there before the 6:00 AM start of the service. With Easter moving forward and back from late March to late April, the time of sunrise varies from after 7:00 AM to about 6:20. It was at about 6:40 this morning so there was enough light towards the end of the service to get some reasonable photos at ISO 1600 at f/3.5. In order to get the entire steeple in the picture, I have to use a fairly wide angle lens (10mm) which gives it that characteristic tilt.

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Good Harbor Beach

Photograph taken on Saturday, July 09, 2022 by Henry
Good Harbor Beach

Good Harbor Beach

After we finished getting things ready for tomorrow’s wedding (or at least did as much as we could get done today), Dorothy and I went to Good Harbor Beach. We sat on blanket on the sand and read our books while the sun was setting behind us and the sky turned that wonderful blue that you can only see after dusk or before dawn. There was a layer of low clouds over the ocean and the picked up some wonderful color, which was reflected in the water. Add the moon and here’s what you get. And in case you’re wondering (as I was), Zillow says that house is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5 million. I think you can see why.

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Cloud Shadow

Photograph taken on Saturday, June 25, 2022 by Henry
Cloud Shadow

Cloud Shadow

Cathy, Dorothy, and I all rode out to the Poolesville area late this afternoon. Dorothy needed to help Mary get some things ready for an event she was hosting tomorrow. Cathy and I chatted with Mary and Ted for a while but mostly we walked around enjoying being out in the country. The sun was going down and the clouds were quite dramatic. I particularly like this one, casting a shadow upwards. It was quite warm and the sun going down did help alleviate that somewhat.

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Easter Sunrise Service

Photograph taken on Sunday, April 17, 2022 by Henry
Easter Sunrise Service

Easter Sunrise Service

In 2020 there was not Easter Sunrise Service, cancelled because of the lockdowns in response to the Wohan Flu. In 2021 we went to an outdoor service but not at sunrise. This year, things have progressed to something approximating how it was in the past. The sunrise service was at the regular 6:00 AM time and we had a breakfast afterward in the Upper Room. It was a wonderfully beautiful day (although Cathy was a bit cold when we first arrived). I had really missed this the last two years and it was great to be back. As usual, I took a few pictures, which I try to do unobtrusively toward the end of the service.

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Gettysburg Battlefield

Photograph taken on Tuesday, November 23, 2021 by Henry
Gettysburg Battlefield, from Little Round Top

Gettysburg Battlefield, from Little Round Top

As mentioned in Sunday’s post, David, Darius, and Maggie drove up from New Mexico, arriving late Saturday evening. Cathy and I took the day off today and went up to Pennsylvania. David and Darius went to the Gettysburg Battlefield on their own. Cathy, Dorothy, Maggie, and I went to the farm first and put up some more screen on the porch. It’s two thirds done. I also took some measurements for replacement stair stringers for the front porch. A couple of them are well on their way to falling apart. After over 40 years exposed to the weather, I guess it’s no surprise. From there we went to Gettysburg. We started with the Pennsylvania monument, where the girls’ ancestor’s regiment is listed. Then to Devil’s Den followed by Little Round Top, where this photograph was taken. Then to Culp’s Hill, again, where the family was apparently represented in the actual battle. It was a beautiful day, very windy and cool, but quite lovely.

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