Picture of the Day - Pillow Lava On Mountaintop

My hiking buddy Mike and I made it up to the top of Rinconada Trial on the spine of Santa Lucia Mountains this morning. Near the top of one small mountain are various outcroppings of exposed pillow lava deposits which formed on the Mid-Miocene ocean-bed off of the coast of what would later become California.
Photo by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Church Lady Wins On Sunday

Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" wins the vote as best SNL character over the course of its' 40 years. Above are the seedings.

Picture of the Day - Valentine's Sunset

This was the sunset scene from Santa Margarita Ranch tonight at the wedding I worked.
Photo by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).

Graphic of the Day - Valentine's Day Edition

Stan The Man Is Dead

This morning legendary KTLA-TV reporter Stan Chambers (above right) died of old age surrounded by his family: he was 91. Chambers started his reporting run through television and Southern California mayhem history with live coverage of the rescue of little Kathy Fiscus in 1949. From there on he reported on just about every major Southern California manifestation of mayhem which occurred up through the mid-2000's. I remember him most vividly for his reportage of myriad quakes and fires throughout the 1990's and into the 2000's. I missed him after his retirement and will continue to miss him following his passage into eternity. The image courtesy of KTLA-TV via Eric Spillman (all rights reserved) and shows Spillman and Chambers in the KTLA newsroom reporting live on the Northridge Earthquake the evening following.

Filament In The Firmament

A dark, snaking line across the lower half of the sun in this Feb. 10, 2015 image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a filament of solar material hovering above the sun's surface. SDO shows colder material as dark and hotter material as light, so the line is, in fact, an enormous swatch of colder material hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. Stretched out, that line – or solar filament as scientists call it – would be more than 533,000 miles long. That is longer than 67 Earths lined up in a row. Filaments can float sedately for days before disappearing. Sometimes they also erupt out into space, releasing solar material in a shower that either rains back down or escapes out into space, becoming a moving cloud known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME. SDO captured images of the filament in numerous wavelengths, each of which helps highlight material of different temperatures on the sun. By looking at such features in different wavelengths and temperatures, scientists learn more about what causes these structures, as well as what catalyzes their occasional eruptions. Image and caption courtesy of NASA (all rights reserved).

Picture of the Day - Juvenile Delinquent Possum

Tonight this was the scene on my backyard fence tonight as this teenaged possum attempted to finish off the fast-food sandwiches in my backyard that my mom left for my dog today while I was at school. Needless to say, Tequila was rather vociferous in her opposition to this presence on her backyard fence.
Photo by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved).