Rainbow

A ladybug on Main Street

Well, plans are quite interesting. We get to the Lick Observatory, which happens to be the oldest observatory built on a mountain, and we missed the most recent tour. (Tours are informal, and frequent — they start whenever someone has the time and someone arrives. The observatory isn’t that frequented by visitors.) Because we missed the tour, we ate our lunch that we picked up at Trader Joe’s in an alcove inset with a statue of some Reverend who helped out the astronomy program.

We went on the tour, which was encredibly informal, and was more of a questions of curiosity thing for me. “Why isn’t the floor flush” and what not. Quite an awesome place to be, and if it wasn’t for the copious amounts of physics that are currently beyond my grasp — I could call the place home. The original telescope is the one we initially viewed, built in 1887.

My mother wasn’t up for the journey to the other side of the compound to see the reflecting one. My father and I journeyed and half way to our destination and alarms started to go off, then the “air raid” siren kicked in. Apparently there was a fire at the incinerator. Figuring it was going to be easily solved, my dad and I just continued to our destination.

After being somewhat disappointed with the view, we returned and only got half way seeing my mother somewhat alarmed. She saw the fire and it looked a little fierce for her comfort. None the less the moment we saw the blackened field it made perfect sense.

I’m not going to describe what exactly happened, but there were two CDF Fire Observation Planes, one CDF Helicopter, the Observatory’s fire-truck, and numerous other fire-trucks that showed up. We captured two water drop runs on video, and picked up two beautiful photographs of other water drops.

Leaning against the railing at the top of the Observatory I remarked to lady who gave us the tour, “hundreds of millions of dollars in lenses, and photographic equipment, but nobody here has a camera.” Everyone who was up at the Observatory and not fighting the fire asked me to send the pictures and the video. I’ll be doing that tomorrow sometime during the day. I have plenty of video to upload.

Finally, because of the height of the observatory, the sun’s rays were hotter, and I was baking. I thought it would be cooler than Sunnyvale. I was very wrong.

So, that was the beginning of my day. My mother thought that we wouldn’t be let down the mountain, and with my brother at school and no emergency contact to pick him up, we needed to be at the house for 16h40. We arrive home with 40 minutes to spare at 16h00, and the bus shows up. Christ! The bus was forty minutes early. That is horribly early. My mother was none too pleased, and will probably make a complaint to the school trustee, because when my bother isn’t early the bus ride to the school that is fifteen minutes away takes ten minutes shy of two hours. Egad, and I though the 680 was bad back in Ottawa.

Below is a link to the gallery with better, and more, images of the fire. Tomorrow I upload the video I shot on my trip to San Fran, and the video of the fire-fighting escapades. My San Francisco trip seems less of an extravaganza now.

Mount Hamilton Brush Fire

Ah well, in the mean time, I’ve always got Google. Well, not so much in the mean time, I’ve still got Google. I’m all caught up on uploading, so if you want to see my photos from my trip to San Francisco, Pier 39, and the Golden Gate Bridge, visit my Picasa gallery: San Francisco.