Earth Wonderland

09/04/2023

300 years old Cherry blossoms in Shizuoka

📸 m_yama_yama

25/03/2023

19/02/2023

Sunrise over Hobbit Beach from Heceta Head on the Oregon coast!

17/11/2022

I decided to channel my inner Van Gogh with this one. Looks best if you make it full screen by tapping on the picture and then I'd pinch to zoom out just a bit and then look all around including up and down. This started out as the 360 degree version of the picture I posted up yesterday of the Milky Way over the Trinity Alps of Northern California. Then I used brush strokes to cause the streaking of stars and landscape. This weekend I went to an exhibit where the took the works of Vincent Van Gogh and projected them onto large screens and the floor in a large space so it seemed that you were actually in one of his paintings. It was very cool and so I thought I could try and create something similar to share with you. Many people have said my landscape astrophotographic images remind them of Van Gogh but I thought I'd push them a bit further. Hope you enjoy! :)

I'll include a non 360 version as a comment so you can see how it was made a bit more and I'll also include a picture of the time I decided to dress up as a self portrait of Vincent for Halloween.

27/10/2022

Another gorgeous sunrise today. This time I decided to let Lassen be the star in the foreground. Good Morning!

10/07/2022

The Parade of Planets! Woohoo! I finally finished it and can share the incredible 360-degree scene. You'll be able to see the 5 naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) in a line in order as well as the crescent moon, lots of stars and the very faint band of the Milky Way (going directly up over Mt. Shasta and then also directing behind the starting view), Andromeda Galaxy, the Pleiades, climbers on their way up Mt. Shasta, the city lights of the town of Mt. Shasta, a small fire that happened that night near the town, and of course the start of a pretty sunrise. It's worth it to tap/click to make it full screen and look all around including up and down. It's high resolution so on a tablet or mobile device it's also worth pinching to zoom in on a few areas. I've tried to make the planets stand out a bit from the stars but by including the stars it does make it more difficult. Starting in a line just to the right of Shasta, you should still be able to see Mercury in the haze, Venus (and the moon) above and to the right of that. Mars and then Jupiter are further in that line and finally Saturn is quite far around from the starting point of view.

Starting about a month ago, I had many people suggesting I needed to capture the planets in a line. Truthfully, I really wasn't very enthralled by the opportunity. I knew how far apart from each other they were going to be and accordingly how small they were going to appear in a picture. Still, it's hard to feel you're letting people down and harder still for me to admit that I couldn't get something that worked. I eventually found a composition of Mercury, Venus, the crescent Moon, and the Pleiades I liked over the Castle Crags (a few pictures back), but it took longer to realize as difficult as it would be due to rapidly changing lighting conditions that a 360-degree picture would be the best way to share the experience. I had to take the pictures quite quickly and even then, it was hard to blend everything and get the very different light levels to balance. In the end I'm really happy with it! I hope you like it too! :)

20/06/2022

A collection of stone alphabets, from A to Z by Molly Montgomery 😮
It took several years for this artist to find all these stones on the beach and they are not altered from their original state in any way. They have naturally occurring designs formed on them that look like the letters of the alphabets. What it literally means to be written in stone! 😄
📷 Molly Montgomery

18/06/2022

Miners from Uruguay Minerals have recently unearthed an amethyst geode in the shape of a heart
Photo: Uruguay Minerals

03/05/2022

23/04/2022

Time for another phone formatted hubble telescope view. This is M57 known as the ring nebula. It's a planetary nebula formed during the collapse of a star much like our sun at the end of its lifetime. All stars eventually run out of elements to fuse in their core and then gravity wins the battle against the pressure caused by nuclear fusion. Much of the mass will collapse into a highly dense and rapidly spinning white dwarf which is visible at the center of the nebula (including this one) until it eventually cools down. Some of the mass is ejected out and can be seen as if they were expanding rings or bubbles. In this picture you see several layers of these. In about 5 billion years, this will be the fate of our own sun. Hope you enjoy the picture. As always feel free to download and use it on your phone as a background if you wish. :)

02/04/2022

I love the sunrises from my backyard in March and early April when the wildflowers come out. I haven't managed to get a good one with the flowers in it this year so I'm sharing this one from April 1st 2017. Happy April 1st. :)

20/03/2022

Happy Spring! It's the vernal equinox today! 😊 I figured flowers were appropriate. Here's one formatted for phone backgrounds so you need to click or tap to make full screen to see all of them and there are a lot of colorful wildflowers since this was taken during a superbloom. Hope you enjoy and start seeing flowers around you some more. 😁

17/03/2022

A beautiful sunrise in Sweden :)

07/02/2022

A magical mushroom portal from my friend 🌿🍄
I just had to share.. who else loves this wreath ?!? 😍🔮✨
•
•
•

22/01/2022

My latest photo of the Triangulum Galaxy, a face-on spiral galaxy over 50 thousand light years in diameter.

Those pink areas are nebulous star-forming regions - some of the largest known stellar nurseries in the universe!

Captured Sept. '19 under dark skies.

18/01/2022

Milky Way over Lassen Peak. Definitely one of my favorite spots day or night. On this night there was a lovely green airglow and I really loved the placement of the Andromeda Galaxy right over the tree on the left side of the image. This is a stereographic projection of part of a 360 degree panorama and so it is even wider than any fisheye lens could take in a single shot. Hope you enjoy! :)

17/01/2022

California’s redwood forests are known for their gigantic trees, but one magnificent tree in particular really stands out.

07/12/2021

A Rainbow Eucalyptus tree on Maui, Hawai

📷 Matthias Haker Photography

20/11/2021

Partial lunar eclipse was amazing!!
Soon more images! 🔴🤩

After photographers have a sleep and process their amazing work! Thanks guys for making us dream ✨

04/11/2021

A rainbow formed by falling drops as water from a spring in the about 15 to 20 feet overhead. I managed to arrive at the perfect time to have the water illuminated by sun shining through a small gap in the trees and knew I had to try and photograph the amazing phenomenon. I thought this would be appropriate to share on the first day of Diwali, a day that is the yearly festival of lights for a large group of people. Hope you enjoy! I'll put a phone wallpaper formatted version in the comments though this one is also in the album of phone backgrounds.

P.S. This is the somewhat humorous story of how I learned about Diwali. In graduate school I had several friends from India and one day in Early November I saw a sign announcing a Diwali Sale at the Indian grocery store when I was riding in the car with some of them. I decided to find out what this was about by asking, "What is a Diwali?" thinking this was some sort of item that was on sale. I didn't realize that this would be like asking "What is a Christmas?" Needless to say they were all laughing about it for a few days... :)