Friday Night Lights

 

Friday Night Lights-Aurora version! No editing (except for the built-in cell phone camera editing). My phone has an automatic night camera setting, which is a 3 second exposure. We could see the color slightly with our own eyes, it was really different than the usual look of the sky on a clear night. When I saw this color in this first picture,  I almost burst into tears. I've never ever thought I'd get to see the Northern Lights. And just getting this little bit of it here at home, was overwhelming and so cool.

Over the next couple hours I kept going back out on the deck to take more pictures and was so excited to see how much the color changed. 

I like this one with the yellow-ish light on the trim of the roofline.

It really went through a cycle of different purples and magenta almost fuchsia. (I can never ever spell fuchsia right the first time!)

Deep magenta! And it was finally time for me to go to sleep at 1am. So I missed whatever came next. Unfortunately the next two nights we got nothing down here, so I'm super pleased that it was so clear out on Friday night. 

Now I really want to go to Norway even more to see the Northern Lights without the aid of a camera.

Wandering Wednesday - San Diego

Hey, here's a contemporaneous Wandering Wednesday post, live from San Diego! I really really love California, but it's so very very long. And it took us a longer than usual time to drive down to San Diego in the rain. The stopped traffic in LA allowed me to take this picture out the windshield of some very dramatic graffiti, gotta love that font.

What a way to spend our 34th anniversary, all day in the car, but we make it fun. And we got to have a great dinner out with a Very Enthusiastic waiter who insisted on taking our picture. The conference that my DH has been going to the whole time I've known him is in San Diego or LA, but next year it's in San Franciso, woohoo!

I like the symbols on the Seaport banner. Looks like a modern quilt design to me. 

I washed my very dirty SF Giants hat and it dried quickly in the sun. I may be able to score some tickets to the SF Giants vs. San Diego Padres opening day home game which is just a few blocks away. We shall see...not sure I want to go to a baseball game alone and root for the opposing team.

The foggy rainy harbor, that's the Coronado Bridge in the distance.

We have a pretty nice view out of our window for all the sunsets.

I liked the reflection of the sunset in the other tower of our hotel.

Another modern quilt looking banner. That one building looks like it's fallen over compared to the other one! Intentional? Just to be interesting?

I know I've seen something like this before probably online somewhere, but I loved this in the coffee shop where I got my latté.

The Horton Hotel is in the Gaslamp District, it's not in its original location, the city saved it and moved it here. I'm glad, because you really don't see a lot of working hotels like this any more.

The Horton is supposedly haunted and that white shrouded figure in the window is a little spooky until you realize it's just a nice marble statue of Mary.

Hello Sunshine! That's the name of the paper maché horse in the window.

The Coaster and the San Diego trolley comes through on the train tracks near our hotel. I really like this shadow picture of all the devices I took while waiting for the intersection to open.

I took this because of the super rusty mission bell, but the rest of it is cool too. Train tracks, fence, fountain that looks like a lap pool, walkway, rest of the fountain that looks like a big pool complete with floating seagulls and that beautiful blue sky.

Keep Looking Up

Just a reminder to my self, and maybe you too. Keep looking up.

 It is always beautiful.

 Moment to moment it changes.

 Never once the same.

 Beauty, drama, color.

 All there even at twilight.

 When the moon is still low.

Or it is high noon.
Keep looking up.

Winter Sky

I've been taking lots of pictures of the winter sky lately. Here are a few as I waited in the car in our driveway.

These were taken through the car window, so there is a slight reflection of my camera.

You can really see my camera in this one.

I think this is my favorite.

The clouds were really striking.

I think this is my favorite because of the bird on the telephone wire in the left lower corner.

This is better if you enlarge it. I love how the underlying shape of a tree is so starkly emphasized with the low winter light.

The Bluest Blue

Sometimes the sky is even bluer than you think it can possibly be.

How is that possible?

Do we forget that this color is there for us to see?

I always remember the color of the earth,

and note the hue of leaf or blade of grass.

Looking up to check the color of the sky

Just to see if it is different today.

This picture was taken at Montezuma's Castle outside of Sedona on our trip last month. I think the two birds are hawks, they were circling around,riding the air currents the whole time we were there. I was glad to get both of them in the same picture.