Honestly, this caught me a bit by surprise. The news yesterday seemed to imply that the targets were a group of French school kids, but it turns out that along with the Utahn, a Spanish woman was also killed.
A brief snowstorm blew by evening before last just before sundown, passing over Thatcher before heading straight for Tremonton. Snagged some fair photos of it. The panoramas here are reduced to 10% full size.
While I’m usually pretty good with cats, the fact is that cats are *generally* untrusting of humans they don’t know… and for good reason. So I was not overly offended a few days ago when, going for a walk, I happened across this feller on the bank of an agricultural ditch and he gave me the stink-eye. I don’t know if I interrupted a mouse hunt, but it was clear that he didn’t want me there. Shortly after, he took off like a shot.
Moar:
Here’s some foteygrafs.
Weather began moving in a couple nights back, which added some variety to the night sky. As always, 1/10 scale panoramas from Thatcher, Utah.
Looking west:
Looking south, with the lights from Salt Lake City at center (behind Little Mountain) and Ogden at left.
As previously hinted at, some time down the line I have a project going that required the acquisition of a new camera. It has proven good at taking photos of the night sky, but that’s incidental to the project at hand. Relevant to the task was a short trip a week ago down to the Hill Aerospace Museum, where I took a bunch of photos. By “a bunch,” it’s somewhere in the area of just short of 400 photos of Hill’s AD-1 Skyraider, and around 140 photos of other aircraft. These are all 24 megapixel (6000X4000) shots, about 11 megabytes each (yes, I’m lame enough to point out that the first digital camera I ever worked with could squeeze half a dozen shots onto a single 1.4 megabyte floppy disk). The photos were uploaded to Dropbox, a process that took a day and a half (yay, old-ass netbook).
The photography and the uploading was all part of a test. The photos are going to someone who can hopefully do something pretty interesting with them… assuming the photography is up to snuff. If this all works, the project to come later should prove to be pretty interesting.
So, to the point: the camera cost money. There are a few more lenses and hardware I’d like to procure, which costs more money – a couple grand. The Big Contract Job that came along last summer finished a month ago (as in the contract was complete to everyones satisfaction), so spending like a Trump on equipment is out. So… capitalism! Who wants about six gigabytes of airplane photos? How’s five bucks sound? Use the “Tip Jar” PayPal link below, select at least $5 (what the heck, select $100 just to show up your buddies). There *should* be an opportunity to leave a note; if so, make sure to mention “Spad Photos” or something like that. I’ll then share the Dropbox folder with the email address associated with the PayPal payment.
———–
Panorama taken a few nights ago showing the Thatcher, Utah, megalopolis with Venus and Mars. This is reduced in size to 10% of the original… yeah, it’s a sizable panorama.
In advance of a project a little ways down the road, I have procured a new camera (Nikon D5500), and have been running it through its paces. Last night I did some night sky photography, catching a whole lot of satellites. Upon reviewing the photos, one satellite seemed to do something a little odd. As far as I can tell it’s not due to the camera screwing up in any way.
One of the bigger local news stories here in Utah right now is an inversion squatting over the Salt Lake valley, turning the air quality into garbage. Worst air in the USA just now, in fact.
One of the reasons for this is the Wasatch Mountains (i.e. the walls of Mordor) that create a north-south barrier on the eastern side of Salt Lake City. It takes a good storm to blow the air in SLC up and over the mountains. In effect, climate and topography have teamed up to make things bad for humans. So since nature has gone to war against Mankind, we should fight back.
A simple solution would seem to present itself: the thousands of feet of damn-near vertical walls backing up SLC should be breached. Done properly, this would create an outlet for the air, like poking a hole in a dam. And what better way is there than nuclear explosives?
The last American nuclear detonation was way, waaaaaaay back in 1992. There are some blog readers who were surely born well after that (thanks for making me feel old, once again). There are people who were born after that who have achieved advanced degrees in nuclear engineering. Imagine it: a degree in something that hasn’t occurred in your lifetime, and it’s not a history degree.
So, an operation to nuke a hole in the Wasatch range would be useful on many levels. This is not something that could or should be slapped together overnight, but perhaps a five or ten year program. A great deal of study to determine how many nukes where to create what sort of breach. An operation to develop all-new nukes for civil engineering, with a series of tests in the Nevada test range. And then the actual operation to blast a channel through the mountains. I would tentatively suggest a hundred or so detonations along the current route of I-80 to lower the level and broaden it, and a similar series paralleling that, perhaps ten to twenty miles north and another to the south. The eminent domain issues would be pretty substantial, but Utah could, I think, generate the funds needed by the simple expedient of charging property taxes on Utah land currently controlled by the Federal government (the feds control 34.2 million acres of Utah… charge ’em a nominal $500 per acre per year, that’d be a nice $17.1 billion per year).
The detonations themselves would be most likely a slow process. Starting way off in the relatively unpopulated east and marching west, one blast at a time, with each westward blast adjusted based on the current state of things. The last blasts would have to be carefully calibrated and placed so that the mountains slide down to the east, rather than falling west into the cities… that would of course be non-optimal. There would be a vast amount of dirt and rock that would need to be hauled away, a process liable to take several years. An obvious place to put this slightly radioactive rubble would be in Bingham Canyon… humans dug a giant hole in the ground to pull out copper and other metals; what better for it afterwards than to fill it back up?
The new wind-channels carved through the mountains would not only let the crappy air flow out, but would also funnel winds though, making them good locations for wind turbines for power generation. And when the wind stops, you could feed power into the windmills from the terawatt-class nuclear powerplants floating in the re-worked Great Salt Lake to turn them into blowers to suck the air through…
