I keep walking past this empty storefront at the Irvine Spectrum, and I have yet to spot anything indicating just what is going in. The phrasing kind of implies that something specific is opening soon. It makes me wonder if I’m supposed to recognize the pattern or something.

Any ideas?

It basically is a rainbow, except formed by reflections in tiny glass beads (used for sandblasting) instead of raindrops. The physicist who posted his (much better) photo to APOD had a better camera handy. And a linear polarizer. (Don’t you always carry one of those?)

Sadly, I only had my phone.

Spotted in Old Town San Diego.

I transferred a bunch of photos from my phone last night and posted them to my Flickr photostream. This one’s the fountain in front of the movie theaters at The District.

Saddleback Snow, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Not as spectacular as December’s display, but still nifty. The San Gabriel Mountains were really impressive this morning, but I didn’t have time to catch a picture.

Also: it’s way too cold for Southern California. The car thermometer said 45°F.

The sunset view as I left the office this evening. The clouds turned even deeper orange over the drive home, with streamers of pink running halfway across the sky.

I cut across a vacant lot on my way to lunch last Friday. Most of it is just dirt and flattened stalks of of dry grass, but there are some plants that have sprung up since it was last mowed (probably sometime in spring) or have managed to hang on past then. (There’s a 2-foot-tall palm tree elsewhere on the lot.)

This was a cluster, maybe 3 feet long and 2 feet wide, of little white flowers about 1″–1½” wide. I put the camera as close to ground level as I could without setting it down, and aimed as best as I could from that angle. I took about a dozen photos, and lucked out: halfway through the shoot, a butterfly fluttered into the cluster.

Wait, something doesn’t fit. A “big, fat honkin’ party?” Last I looked, this was a fitness center, not a fatness center!

It doesn’t help that one of the prizes is a big-screen TV. I didn’t realize “couch potato” fell under the category of “Ultra Sport.”

My parents gave me a flexible mini-tripod for Christmas, and it proved very helpful here, as there was nowhere flat where I could set the camera and still get a good view. I ended up coiling it around a stair railing, which held the camera in place long enough to get a decent exposure.

I seriously thought about pulling my SLR camera out of the closet and seeing whether I had any film for it, but ultimately decided against it.

The article mentions that messages put out for psychological operations in foreign markets are making their way back to American audiences. I’m not sure this photo qualifies as PsyOps, but I think it does qualify for a caption contest.*

Please post your suggestions in the comments.

(via Slashdot)

*OK, you won’t win anything, but with luck the other entries will make you laugh.

This view of the Moon and Venus was taken from our apartment balcony earlier this evening.

I also took a picture yesterday, from the top of a parking structure near John Wayne Airport (we went to a show at UCI later that evening.) You can see the red trail an airplane left as it crossed the frame:

Having seen that pairing last night, I knew I had to be ready to catch it today! I figured the Moon would be a lot closer, but I hadn’t expected it to actually pass Venus tonight. It really gives you an idea of how far the Moon moves in 24 hours. (or, in this case, roughly 23 hours, since yesterday’s picture was taken at 6:00 and today’s was taken at 5:10).

To be honest, I wasn’t actually certain it was Venus. It was my first thought, because of the brightness and the color, but I kept thinking it was too far from the sun. I kept trying to convince myself it was Jupiter or maybe Saturn (it wasn’t red enough for Mars, and besides, I’d seen Mars on the other side of the sky the night before). When I looked it up and realized it was Venus, I started remembering my days in high school when I would walk to school for a 7:00am “zero period” class. In winter it would sometimes be just dark enough when I left to see the planets and the brightest stars. I would keep my eye on Venus as the sky brightened, trying to see how late I could still see it by knowing exactly where to look.

(P.S. sorry for the repeated updates—I accidentally hit “Publish” instead of “Save and Continue”)