Categories
Tag: imported from pivot
Posts brought over from my old Pivot blog. Missing comments and tags, unhappily.
Categories
The Spruce Goose!
Part of the qualifying/timebuilding for a Commercial PIlot’s License is a long cross-country trip, at least 300NM from your point of orgin. Most people make a flying expedition out of it, taking a couple of days and sometimes a friend – there’s no round-trip requirements, so two people can share a 300NM trip – one person flies out, the other back, both get their trip done. That’s exactly what two friends have done over the last three days, and they invited me along (I completed mine several years ago) because I’ve been into the United States by air and they hadn’t before this.
We went from Victoria, BC, Canada down to North Bend, Oregon via Seattle-Boeing Field & Astoria, then turned inland and north back to McMinnville, Oregon, home of the Evergreen Aviation Museum & the Spruce Goose. Wikipedia has a good Hughes H4 (Spruce Goose) article, for those wanting more information.
Short version: It’s a monster airplane, the biggest thing in the world at the time, still the largest seaplane & largest wooden aircraft ever made; only the 747 & A380 really rival it in sheer size. The main building of the Evergeen Museum is a huge building, and it’s still barely large enough to fit the H4 in. There’s absolutely no way to take a picture of the entire beast; the building would have to be three times the floorspace to allow you to get far enough back and still be inside! My camera does reasonable wide-angle setups, but you either need a fisheye lens or you need to resort to panorama stitching to get the whole beast in. Lacking a fisheye, I turned to Hugin, which has the additional advantage of being both free and Free.
More over the next few days, as I sort & process almost 200 photos, almost all from the Spruce Goose’s museum!
Categories
Cool Links, 22 Jan/09
APOD’s famously broad definition of an “astronomy picture” (they decided that the awesome “Where The Hell Is Matt” video qualified) has lead to a really spectacular lenticular cloud photo from NZ being today’s image.
Not sure what a lenticular is? Think, “Gee, that looks like a UFO” and youŕe most of the way there. I’ve only seem them once – and had no camera with me at the time – but they’re amongst the most spectacular clouds in the sky.
Speaking of clouds: The Cloudspotter’s Guide (Wikipedia ISBN link) is a fun, non-technical book, devoted to both the science and the art of clouds & cloudspotting. Good book even if you’re not a fullblown weather geek like I am.
I hadn’t realized that Canada’s National Film Board was putting huge amounts of their back-catalog up online for anyone to watch; one I especially enjoyed this afternoon was a 18min short film called Blake from 1968, about a friend of the filmmaker’s who has a “flying hobo” lifestyle. Not sure you could get away with some of that flying these days, but it’s still a neat short, and classic NFB fare in it’s quirkiness.
The NFB has won scads of awards, especially for it’s animation work. The absolute, no-questions, classic piece of NFB animated Canadian coolness is, of course, The Log Driver’s Waltz. Go watch it, it’s only 3 minutes long and if it doesn’t make you grin, you’re probably clinically dead and didn’t realize it.
From APOD to the NFB via the Cloudspotter’s Guide… good thing I have a “random” tag on my blog already… 
Categories
A Fine Flying Day
Up early this morning for the second flight of my Flight Instructor training – a very good flight, overall, with a bunch of stuff I hadn’t seen since the very early days of my Private Pilot training (six years and 300+ hrs ago…). It was clear, cold and very, very frosty this morning, though!
This evening I got to fly again, just as a passenger this time. This is actually a bit of a treat; I’m usually in one of the front seats, too busy with flying the plane to indulge in much sightseeing. Being cargo meant I could exercise the limits of my little digital camera, and get some very cool, rather impressionistic night shots from the back seat.
More, as always, at my Flickr stream – enjoy!