Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The weather is most of the problem at the moment. It’s been a very disappointing few weeks of weather. Persistent rain has provided enough water at a time of maximised sunlight hours to invigorate our hedges well beyond their normal confines.
The photographer in me had four excitements today. None could be enjoyed for their photography but there were other compensations to hand.
Once upon a time I felt like a surrealist sitting in front of The Alamo. The grackles were coming to roost in the live oaks, squawking and whistling and chirping. The crepuscular light also brought hordes of bats who appeared from the west and I wondered why no one worried about a rain of droppings.
I missed the photo of a lifetime. A woman walked past in a full black hijab over an iridescent blue burka. She crossed the street in front of an illuminated Cinderella-themed wedding carriage drawn by two white horses driven by a mock lonesome cowboy.
We walked Dún Laoghaire pier before 9 and were rewarded by the diving of gannets and terns into the slack tide.
The mean tidal range in the harbour is about 3 m while the difference between the lowest and highest astronomical tides is recorded as 4.7 metres. An amazing feat of engineering, this was in 1842 the largest man-made harbour in western Europe.
Then I moved a few kilometres south to watch people fishing from Dillons Park. Constant change is the reality of living by the sea.
Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma rays that hit our planet quite regularly. They can last for fractions of seconds or minutes. They can be detected from enormous cosmic distances.
Back in April 2010, a satellite detected a 10 second GRB burst. That’s ten seconds of gamma rays that we now know travelled 13 .7 billion years to reach us from a supernova in a galaxy that occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang.
You may already know of the efforts of urban planners to preserve the view of specific places or historic buildings in some cities around the world. These protected views or vistas can have binding legal status for enforcement purposes. You also may be aware that there are thirteen such vistas in London protected by the London View Management Framework.
Views and photographs are today’s story. It starts with sunrise and sunset panoramas taken five hours and thirty-five minutes apart after a four year gap. True north is through the declivity between the two crowns about a quarter of the way in from the right of the lower photograph. My view is restricted on the right by a big cedar and the left is terminated by our window frame. The photographs were not conceived to be perfectly aligned in time or space.
