Category: Photo gallery

Which equinox was that?

Frosted crab apple

Unlike most places in temperate regions, in Kansas the seasons don’t follow a simple spring-summer-fall-winter sequence. This year, for instance, we had a few weeks of spring back in February, followed by heavy winter snows. Today I woke up to find that it was November outside. I wonder if we’ll see any more spring here, or if we’ll go directly from winter to summer.

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It’s not official …

Okame cherry

… until the first tornado warning, but spring is almost here. Trees are still leafless, but daffodils and small bulbs are in full bloom. I visited the botanical garden yesterday and found the pink okame cherry in bloom. The white yoshino cherry is lagging about a week behind. (The very double kwanzan cherry, I am not happy to note, has been cut down.) There are more Botanica pictures beneath the fold.

Continue reading “It’s not official …”

Under the rainbow

Lenten rose

It looked like spring would arrive early this year, but that was before 22 inches of global warming fell. The snow is finally gone, but Wichita is still mostly brown. I figure that it will be another week or two before trees leaf out. I went to the botanical garden yesterday and found very little color aside from pansies and daffodils. The lenten rose, above, was the highlight of the trip. The Corylus avellana was in full bloom; look closely to spot the female flowers.

Corylus avellana

The most colorful item there was the gateway to the children’s garden, below.


Children's garden entrance in Wichita

The okame cherry was showing some pink in its buds. There might be a few flowers opening during the coming week and perhaps more than a few next Saturday. (It’s already cherry blossom season in Japan. Here’s the blooming forecast, should you be planning a trip there soon. (Via J. Greely.))

Update: the panorama works particularly well as a “little planet.”

planet

Faint visitor

panstarrs031213

The sky was mostly clear this evening, so I tried to find Comet PanSTARRS. I couldn’t see it myself — it’s not a bespectacled-eye object in Wichita skies, though possibly someone with better vision than mine can spot it — but my camera did.

No swimming

Y

At the same time the cathedral was being renovated, across the street a new, gigantic YMCA building (with two indoor swimming pools) was being built. Now that it’s finished, construction workers are demolishing the old building, where I used to swim laps in the crowded basement pool. The picture above was stitched together from nine snapshots taken over the fence around the site with my little go-everywhere camera.

Stonehenge Lite

standing stones

We got six inches more snow yesterday, which makes 20 inches since Thursday. I took the scenic route to work this morning, passing by the “standing stones” in a nearby park.

Update: Here’s the panorama. Right-click and pick “little planet” for a different kind of view.


Standing Stones in Riverside Park in USA

This was assembled with Panorama Studio Pro. Hugin, which I had been using, is free, but it’s finicky, and I got tired of constantly finding and editing control points and still getting glitchy output. I also considered PTGui Pro. It has more features than Panorama Studio, notably HDR support, but it didn’t do quite as good a job stitching images together in my tests (though both worked much better than Hugin), and it costs twice as much.