Quaking Aspens

A real Rocky Mountain High.  Golden Quaking Aspen shimmer and rustle in the wind. 

Quaking Aspens
Populus tremuloides is a deciduous tree native to cooler areas of North America, one of several species referred to by the common name Aspen. It is commonly called “quaking aspen”, trembling aspen, American aspen, Quakies, mountain or golden aspen, embling poplar, white poplar, popple, and even more names. The trees have tall trunks, up to 25 m (82 ft) tall, with smooth pale bark, scarred with black. The glossy green leaves, dull beneath, become golden to yellow, rarely red, in autumn. The species often propagates through its roots to form large groves.

The widespread distribution of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) forests on the region’s high plateaus and mountain ranges and their importance to many wildlife species make these forests a significant biotic community on the Colorado Plateau. Large, nearly pure stands of aspen can be seen on the Markagunt, Aquarius, Pansaugunt, and Wasatch Plateaus of central and southern Utah and in the La Sal Mountains on the eastern border of the state. Grand Mesa and the Uncompaghre Plateau in far western Colorado also support extensive aspen forests. Further south, aspen is abundant in the White Mountains, on the Kaibab Plateau, and on the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona. Aspen is most commonly found between 7500 and about 10,500 feet on the Colorado Plateau, particularly on well-watered south-facing slopes.

Aspen is a common name for certain tree species, some, but not all, of those that are classified by botanists in the section Populus, of the poplar genus.  The English name Waverly, meaning "quaking aspen," is both a surname and a unisex given name.

Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall - any time is a good time in Colorado.

Cat and the Dolphins - Some Fin Special

Talking about being at the right place at the right time, and have a camera.  This video is amazing.  It is interesting to watch the cat and dolphins play together.   Enjoy

Two links below with the video attached

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u86BR85y-nA

www.slothster.com/2352-Cat-On-Boat-Plays-With-Dolphins.h
 

Our Magnificent Sun

While web surfing, I came across The Atlantic website and in particular " In Focus with Alan Taylor."  In Focus is The Atlantic's news photography blog. Several times a week, Taylor posts entries featuring collections of images that tell a story. His goal is to use photography to do the kind of high-impact journalism readers have come to expect on other pages of this site.  He has an amazing article entitled "A Trip Around Our Solar System" published in May 2011. 
Taylor enlightens us:  Robotic probes launched by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and others are gathering information for us right now all across the solar system. We currently have spacecraft in orbit around the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Saturn; several others on their way to smaller bodies; and a few on their way out of the solar system entirely. On Mars, a rover called Spirit has just been officially left for dead, after two years of radio silence from it -- but its twin, Opportunity, continues on its mission, now more than 2,500 days beyond its originally planned 90-days. With all these eyes in the sky, I'd like to take the opportunity to put together a photo album of our Solar system -- a set of family portraits, of sorts -- as seen by our astronauts and mechanical emissaries. [38 photos]

On October 28, 2010, astronauts aboard the ISS gazed down on the Earth at night and captured this scene, with Brussels, Paris, and Milan brightly lit. (NASA).

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite captures an image of the Earth's moon crossing in front of the Sun, on May 3, 2011. (NASA/GSFC/SDO)

When a rather large-sized (M 3.6 class) flare occurred near the edge of the Sun, it blew out a gorgeous, waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period on February 24, 2011. This event was captured in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft . Some of the material blew out into space and other portions fell back to the surface. (NASA/GSFC/SDO).  If you get a chance to check out the website, this photo is part of a short video clip showing the flare.  Hot stuff. 

 

A closeup of the solar surface. Part of the largest sunspot in Active Region 10030 recorded on July 15, 2002, with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on La Palma. The width of the cells near the top of the image are roughly 1,000 km. The central part of the sunspot ("the umbra") looks dark because the strong magnetic fields there stop upwelling hot gas from the solar interior. The thread-like structures surrounding the umbra make up the penumbra. Dark cores are clearly visible in some of the bright penumbral filaments that stick out into the umbra. (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

I have been fascinated with outer space for as long as I can remember.  I love exploring into the night sky to see the universe in motion.  Maybe spy a UFO?  You never know.

Back on Earth - Lemur babies born at the Denver Zoo

News back on Earth:

RED RUFFED LEMURS BORN AT DENVER ZOO FOR FIRST TIME IN 13 YEARS

The number 13 might be a lucky number after all. Denver Zoo is proud to announce the birth of four endangered red ruffed lemurs, the first of their species born here in 13 years! The quadruplets, born March 12, include male, Rusty and females, Bordeaux, Chianti and Mena. They are now big enough to explore outside their nest box and are on display can be seen with their parents in a nest box in the Emerald Forest exhibit in Denver Zoo's Primate Panorama.

This is the first litter for both mother, Sixpence, and her mate, Mego. Sixpence was among the infants born in the last litter at Denver Zoo in 1998. Mego came to Denver Zoo from the Duke Lemur Center in April 2008. The two were paired together under recommendation of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' (AZA) Species Survival Plan (SSP) which ensures healthy populations and genetic diversity among zoo animals. Fortunately, the couple has proved to be an excellent match. Though inexperienced, Sixpence has shown she is a very attentive mother and lets Mego know what he needs to be doing.

As their names indicate, red ruffed lemurs are almost entirely covered with red fur, except for their black faces, feet and tails and white patches on the back of their necks. Adults' bodies can grow to about three-feet-long, but their tails, which provide crucial balance in trees, can stretch more than three feet on their own. They are thought to be called "ruffed" because of the tufts of fur around their necks. These resemble ruffs, or large, ruffled collars worn by European men and women in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

Exact red ruffed lemur population numbers in the wild aren't known, but the World Conservation Union (IUCN) classifies them as endangered. Their numbers are thought to be dwindling, mostly due to habitat destruction. Their range has been reduced to a small area in Northeastern Madagascar. There are 88 different species of lemurs that survive only on the island of Madagascar.

Young red ruffed lemurs do not cling to their mothers like many other primates. Instead their mother will typically carry them around with her mouth, almost like a dog or cat. They're groups are matriarchal. They eat primarily fruit and flowers. They are diurnal, meaning they are active both at night and during the day.

Hubble

God’s Glory is revealed through the Hubble Telescope.  As Psalm 8:1 clearly states “LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens.”

The Universe is gloriously transparent to visible light over journeys lasting billions of years. However, in the last few microseconds before light arrives at telescope mirrors on Earth it must travel through our turbulent atmosphere and the fine cosmic details become blurred. It is this same atmospheric turbulence that makes the stars appear to twinkle on a dark night.

Putting a telescope in space is one way of evading this problem. As well as collecting visible light from its orbit high above the atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope also observes the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths that are completely filtered out by the atmosphere.

The Hubble Space Telescope, a joint ESA and NASA project, has made some of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of astronomy. From its vantage point 600 km above the Earth, Hubble can detect light with 'eyes' 5 times sharper than the best ground-based telescopes and looks deep into space where some of the most profound mysteries are still buried in the mists of time.  Here, but are a few examples:

Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometres high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.

Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighbourhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The tower may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. A torrent of ultraviolet light from a band of massive, hot, young stars [off the top of the image] is eroding the pillar.

Mystic Mountain: This photo captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.  This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around the Earth.

The Sombrero Galaxy (M104) is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes that make up its spiral structure. The Sombrero lies at the southern edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies and is one of the most massive objects in that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns. The galaxy is 50,000 light-years across and is 28 million light-years from the Earth.

This image of a pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273 was released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.  The distorted shape of the larger of the two galaxies shows signs of tidal interactions with the smaller of the two. It is thought that the smaller galaxy has actually passed through the larger one.

 

 

 

My Favorite Planet: Saturn

This close-up view of Saturn's disc captures the transit of several moons across the face of the gas giant planet. The giant orange moon Titan — larger than the planet Mercury — can be seen at upper right. The white icy moons that are much closer to Saturn, hence much closer to the ring plane in this view, are, from left to right: Enceladus, Dione, and Mimas. The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet. This picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on 24 February 2009, when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 1.25 billion kilometres from Earth. Hubble can see details as small as 300 kilometres across on Saturn.

 

WATCH: Woman Finds 7-Foot Alligator In Her Bathroom

Being raised in Lake Worth, Florida (South Florida), it was not unusual to see an alligator daily.  There are canals all over the area and from time to time a gator would make its way to your back yard.  Once during a heavy rainstorm, one got stuck in the middle of the shopping center parking lot.  That caused quite a commotion for both beast and people.  When we would go to park or the golf course, there were always gators sunning themselves on the sidewalks and grassy areas. 

You just need to respect the gator.  Give it plenty of room.
(Of course, in my family we are University of FLORIDA GATORS
so it is natural to respect the GATORS)

HOWEVER, seeing this article in the Huffington Post was no surprise to me EXCEPT for the fact the gator entered the house through the dog door.  
It apparently sat on the banks watching the owner's dogs use the dog door
and then used it. 

Amazing.   

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/25/alligator-in-bathroom-florida_n_853197.html

Animals

National Geographic had a photo slideshow of animal pairs.  Some of the photos here are from that slideshow and other sites.  There is one 'odd couple' shot to enjoy.