Yard Work

Once or twice a year we have to cut back the trees and bushes in and around our yard. They lie dormant most of the year, but when we get heavy rains, they go crazy and try to take over all available space.
The weather has been brutally hot, so we've just been working in the early morning and early evening hours each day. Sandra is always happy for any opportunity to use her "alligator" chain saw. It cuts surprisingly quickly and is much safer than a normal saw.
This year we also cut back the olive bushes that are in front of the walls around the perimeter of our back yard. They had gotten tall, unkempt, and scraggly. The yard kind of looks bare naked now, but we're hoping for a wet rainy season this year so that they will all grow back thick and bushy. We have aggressively cut back a few of these bushes in the past and they grew back and filled in wonderfully, so we're hoping that they'll do it again. There are also a few Wayaka trees back there that were getting crowded out. We're hoping that they'll start growing like crazy too, now that they have some space and sunlight. We really like the Wayaka.
We rented a dumpster from Selibon for the weekend. The hot setup is to fill it up with clippings and then Sandra would stomp and bounce them down, and we'd fill it up again, and again, and again...

Dog Days

Have you ever heard the expression "the dog days of August?" Well, as the tropical storms and hurricanes have been crossing the Caribbean to our north, it has been rather windless and hot here on Bonaire for the last couple weeks.

The dogs really like hanging out on the cool tile floors inside the house. They perk up at night when it becomes a little cooler.

Clouds of Stars and Mosquitoes

We had a slight backwards wind today, with clouds and a little rain. But the skies cleared up quite nicely in the evening. I zoomed out to the south end of Bonaire for some stargazing.

The stars were really great but the mosquitoes were absolutely brutal tonight. I was re-applying repellent every 10 minutes or so, but they were still attacking any time I quit moving around.

Kind of made it hard to look through the telescope. I didn't even get the binoculars out of their cases, but I did enjoy the views for an hour or so with my bare naked eyeballs. And I snapped a couple pictures, one of which came out pretty good.

This is a single three minute and 48 second exposure of the Milky Way star clouds in the constellation Scutum. M11 and M26 are visible towards the middle of the picture and to the right of the middle of the picture.

Blasts From the Past

Pat and Denny Hogan were vacationing here on Bonaire recently. They had a great time visiting Bonaire friends from when they lived here back in the day. Speaking of visiting, Sandra was visiting them in here in 1980, when we got engaged. Sergio and Amy Da Silva were here recently as well. They first met each other on Bonaire, while they were both serving with Trans World Radio, and wanted their kids to share the Bonaire experience. After many years with Radio Trans Mundial in Brazil, they are now living in Michigan in the USA.
Sergio has a doctorate in Psychology and teaches at Calvin College. He didn't psychoanalyze any of us while they were here, phew! But he did teach us a great song that he wrote in Brazil, following a missions trip to Africa.

Long Time no Blog

All my spare time, these last couple weeks has been spent glued to the boob tube watching the Olympics. Many of the events took place in the wee hours of the morning, or while I was at work. So we recorded tons of stuff at all hours of the day and night, and then watched our favorite events at our leisure.
For example, I recorded the mtn. biking while we slept last night, and then watched it before church this morning. :)

I've still been getting in my own mtn. biking of course. At my advanced age, it is much easier to maintain one's fitness than to try to regain it. There has been little to no wind here on Bonaire for the last week or more. That makes for great cycling, but hot and muggy living. The air temperature is only a degree or two warmer than it was a month ago, but the lack of wind makes it feel much hotter.

It's cloudy today, which makes it feel a little cooler. Sitting in front of a fan helps too! The clouds are a mixed blessing, however. Venus and Mercury are quite close together in the early evening sky, but I haven't been able to see them for a few days now. I'm hoping for clear skies at least once during the next week or so while the moon is out of the sky, so we can get in some major Milky Way star gazing.

Dirty Jobs

Have you ever seen Mike Rowe on the Discovery Channel trying his hand at all sorts of very yucky but totally necessary jobs? Well I thought of Mike a week ago Saturday, while I was shoveling chicken poo here on Bonaire. It turns out that well aged chicken poo doesn't smell bad at all, but it does make great fertilizer, something that the poor soil of Bonaire needs badly.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this epic event...too busy shoveling.

Believe it or not, the whole adventure was a fundraiser for the building fund of the International Bible Church. A relative of the pastor's wife runs the chicken farm and graciously supplied the chicken manure. Wai-man Chan somehow obtained 250 unused giant bags, and Johann agreed to sell the bags of poo-fertilizer at the Green Lable Nursery.

So all we had to do was shovel, bag and deliver. Hawking poo on the street corner would have been above and beyond the call of duty.

Perseids and Planets

The peak of the Perseid meteor shower occurs tonight. The best viewing, here on Bonaire, should be between 2am and dawn, when the moon will have set and the shower radiant will be high in the sky. The sky has been reasonably clear lately, so maybe I'll head out for a look, if I can tear myself away from the live late night Olympics coverage on TV. Ha-ha, that's a good one.

I'll be out on the road by 6am tomorrow morning for our Tuesday group bike ride, so the trusty VCR will be recording any of those great late night Olympics events, like team handball, (Sandra played it while in high school in Monaco) that we might want to see.

I must confess that unlike some friends of ours, I'm rarely motivated to to bounce out of bed and venture outside in the wee hours of the morning in hopes of spotting those all to infrequent meteors. What I will do, however, is wake up and peak out the window just to make sure that some sort of once in a lifetime meteor storm isn't going on out there. That paid off in 1998 when the Leonids produced a display of bright meteors and fireballs that I'll never forget!

The planets are also putting on a good show this week, and it's right after sunset, so I don't have to loose any beauty sleep to see it. Venus and Saturn will be very close together on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Venus is really easy to spot, here on Bonaire, but I might need to break out the binoculars to see Saturn.

By Thursday evening, Saturn will be placed exactly halfway between Venus and Mercury. That should be nice. And then by Saturday evening, Mercury will have moved up to be halfway between Venus and Saturn. If the skies remain clear, I should be able to watch the whole show each evening while cooking our nightly chicken on the grill. Now that's my kind of astronomy!

Cruising Curacao

Sandra and I were on our neighbor island, Curacao, all day Saturday. She had a mid morning doctor appointment, but the only flights we could get were at 6am and 9pm. So we had lots of time to visit a couple warehouse stores, walk around the downtown Punda shopping district, and visit the zoo. We also visited Burger King, Baskin Robbins and Pizza Hut. Fast food is a fun novelty, when you haven't had any for a few years.

I didn't bring a camera, but I wish I had. They had some very unusual large birds at the zoo, as well as a three day old baby monkey that was riding around on its mother's back.

The traffic was noticeably lighter on Saturday than the usual weekday, and the teeny tiny even-smaller-than-a-Toyota-Yaris car we rented from Budget was a lot of fun.

Moon and Planets

It's been pretty cloudy here on Bonaire, but the skies cleared just in time for us to spot a super skinny Moon and the planet Venus last night.

In this picture, the star Regulus is to the right of the Moon, and the planet Venus is pretty far to the Moon's lower right, just above the roof line of our neighbor's house.


If it is clear again tonight, I hope to zoom out somewhere that has photogenic cacti or palm trees in the foreground.


As this Sky and Telescope story reports, the Moon will be to the left of the planet Saturn tonight, and to the left of the planet Mars on Monday night. The chart included with this story shows the alignment of the moon and planets as seen from the USA. You can tell from my picture that the alignment appeared a bit different here on Bonaire.


The evening planets are actually easier to see here in the Tropics than they are up North.

More Milky Way Madness

It was nice and clear last night, so Sandra and I went to the south end of Bonaire to observe the Summer Milky Way in all its glory. We could see it stretching overhead from the Southern Cross in the South all the way to Cygnus in the North.

Here is photo of the brightest portion of the Milky Way. The star, Antares, is at the top middle and the planet, Jupiter, is a little to the left of the middle at the bottom. This picture shows a larger area of sky than the pictures I posted a week or two ago.

You can identify many of the same features in both pictures, but they will look smaller in this one because of the different scale. I used four minute exposures at ISO 1600 last night. This seemed to bring out the star clouds without making the foreground stars too bright.

New Panoramic Photos

Back a few weeks ago, when I was up on some new dirt roads northeast of Sabadeco taking Kibrahacha pictures, I was impressed by the great scenic views of Hato, Kralendijk, and the bay.

So when we had super clear skies last week, Sandra and I zoomed up there after work and shot some pictures.

I've posted two panoramic images that you can check out if you have a fast Internet connection. The first one is about 1 meg in size I think.
The second one is a wider view and it about 1.5 megs in size.

They are about 800 pixels high, so if you have your browser set to not automatically re-size the pictures you can scroll across them and see lots of detail. If your browser re-sizes them, they'll look pretty bad 'cause everything will be squashed together.

To tell Internet Explorer to not automatically re-size the images, click on the "Tools" button at the top right of your screen. Then click on the "Advanced" tab, scroll down to the "Multimedia" section, and un-check the "enable automatic image resizing" box. Then click "apply" and you can view the images as they were meant to be seen.

Fly to Bonaire Cheap

Delta Airlines is adding a new weekly direct flight from JFK airport in New York, to Bonaire. It begins on December 20. Delta also has a super cheap $478 round trip fare for travel between Jan. 10 and April 4.
Better book those tix soon, you can only buy tix at this price through Aug. 6, or while seats are still available. Here is the story on the Bonaire Insider.

Backyard Wildlife

Sandra enjoys taking pictures of the dog's antics, as well as some of the other wildlife around the house. This iguana seems to know he is safe on the outside of the fence. They don't always make it to safety however.
She shot some interesting parrot pictures lately. Here is one.

Showers - Flowers

We continue to get quite a bit of rain, here on Bonaire. The countryside is amazingly green, especially for a July. There are lots of flowers blooming all over the place too. We have a weird cactus like plant that occasionally produces these humongous flowers.
We also have this purple vine like plant that is looking very lush right now.
The small purple flowers appear in the early morning and fade away during the day.

Tower Painting Finished

This year's antenna tower painting project was successfully concluded back at the beginning of the month. We traditionally wrap up the project with a celebration lunch with the painting crew. This year we held it in the studio lobby with delicious take out from Antriol Catering. Yum!

More Kibrahacha Pictures Posted

Well, I finally got around to posting the flowering Kibrahacha tree pictures that I took a week or two ago. Some of the pictures are panoramas that I put together to help me remember just where the various trees are. Once the yellow flowers fall off, the trees just blend into the countryside.
There is a folder with this years pictures on Winkflash.

If all those pictures aren't enough, there are some Kibrahacha pictures from 2004 on Winkflash too. Just click here to see that album.

The pictures don't display all that big, at least at my laptop with its 1680x1050 screen. If you have a regular (CRT) monitor might want to try setting it to a lower resolution, like 800x600 or even 640x480 so that the pictures use up more of the screen real estate.

Summer Milky Way

The Bonaire skies were clear and cloudless last Sunday night, so Bud Gillan and I went out to the super south end stargazing spot that I inherited from Pierre. We observed with 10x50 binoculars and once the moon set, I took some pictures with a 24mm lens. This is a stack of five images. Each exposure was six minutes long and the camera was set at F4 and ISO 200.
Above is a 100% crop of the lower left part of the top wide angle picture. I drew in the lines of the "teapot" and labeled a few of the many interesting objects we could see in the binoculars. Bud's favorite "fuzz" was M22.

Here is a link, I hope, to a full size version of the top image. I've drawn in the shape of Scorpius as well as the teapot so you can get your bearings.

Patch Tuesday - Panic Wednesday

Both our laptops suddenly lost their access to the Internet Wednesday morning. I could sucessfully ping both URLs and IP addresses but couldn't access anything with IE, or Filezilla, Skype etc.

After playing with the computers for an hour at noon, I finally thought of the Windows updates that had just been applied and un-installed them. Eureka! we had Internet access again.

It turns out that Microsoft Update KB951748 can cause loss of Internet access for ZoneAlarm users on Windows XP/2000. Zone alarm has an updated version that should fix this, but I haven't installed it yet. We are just surfing merrily along updateless.

I guess if you are reading this, you either weren't affected, or have figured it out on your own!

Moon and Planets

On Saturday evening, Saturn, Mars, the bright star Deneb, and the Moon made a straight line in the sky. You'll need to click on this picture to see the planets. Saturn is at the upper left. Then moving towards the lower right you come to Mars, and then Deneb, and finally the moon. On Sunday evening, the Moon had moved up to the left side of Saturn. Mars and Deneb were still making an almost straight line with Saturn. Mars is moving closer to Saturn each evening. This planetary parade is worth watching.
To the right of Deneb, on the right side of the frame, you can see the stars that make up the head of Leo the Lion. This group of stars is also known as the sickle.

Kibrahacha Trees

It's still pretty rainy here on Bonaire, but one fringe benefit is that the Kibrahacha trees put on a spectacular show this week. They began blooming on Sunday. We went out after work on Monday and took some pictures, and we went out again at lunch time on Tuesday for some more Kibrahacha viewing. The show is pretty much over now. I have lots of pictures that I'll probably eventually post in an online folder somewhere or other. But you can get an idea of what the trees looked like from these samples.
I've assembled a couple panoramic views that I'll post sometime too.
The above view is from a new dirt road that has been put in a little north and east of Sabadeco.