American Loon

Since I had been disappointed the night before as to the weather-guessers’ assessment of what constitutes a good reason to go outside and look at the  western horizon, I resolved to keep a “weather eye” on the sky and this coming night looked promising. We still had the smoke from all the western forest fires hanging over us and clouds that looked promising, so promising that they threatened to obscure the entire sky at times, but I had hoped they would thin out a bit towards sundown. And they did. Naturally those that predict the weather and fail, made no mention of the potential of going outside and viewing a pretty sunset, they instead were giving warnings of the potential for rain so they advised to stay inside and Be Safe!

The night before, while flying my drone, I noticed it had developed a twitch in the device that controls the camera. At first, I thought that the drone was mocking me as I have developed twitches of all sorts of late, and this is just the sort of thing that boys do to each other when they notice a weakness, weird behavior or even an odd colored shirt, in one of their buddies. A familiar behavior, of sorts. One that is normally cured by a slap to the head, but not something you can do while the offender is 200 ft in the air.

Here is what it did while landing the night before.

Tonight’s mission would be one of pictures, not video, so I had hoped that whatever had been causing the twitch would calm down enough to get some still images at least.
Here is what I saw when I got to altitude.

Here is a few minutes later.

Here we are looking South. That little bright thing, top, center, left is the moon.

The sun has finally set.

Just before I ran out of battery and have to land, here is a final look.

It is an amazing wonder to behold and it brings to my mind John 1:1-5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Seek the LORD while He may be found; Isaiah 55:6 Our only hope is found in Christ, turn to Him and be redeemed!

We had a bit of sporty weather last night. Oh sure, the weather guys had slapped a “Tornado Watch”, which included the scare quotes, on us during the day, but lately it seems, they are mostly talking about a threat to the Twin Cities. We get included in the scare quotes just because we live in the same state and may have attended the State Fair once or twice in our lifetimes.

It was an odd day to begin with. Had my right ankle give me fits on Saturday, for no good reason, other than why not. Not so bad going down our stairway, but going up a big deal. And then, late afternoon, my ankle decided nothing was wrong and decided to play nice. Odd. Sunday rolls around and my body is telling me I might have been run over by a bus in my sleep. Everything but my ankle was complaining. I normally don’t stay home from church, but I chose to sit home just in case my ankle remembers yesterday’s antics.

Sent my wife off to worship our Lord and Savior, with her sister and mother, and fired up Zoom to participate that way, except the connection to Zoom stopped about 5 minutes into the service. This not being my first rodeo with the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), I went to https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/48-5/paul-defends-his-apostleship-part-1 and listened to MacArthur go through Galatians 1:10-15, which is what our
Pastor Aaron is going through in our little church. My ankle did not complain once and the wife came home and told me it was a good service.

The rest of the day was quiet and sunny, as befitting a “Tornado Watch” type day. Evening shows up and I notice clouds beginning to gather. There was a big storm cell in northern Minnesota and the clouds were lining up north to south. It gets to around 8PM, the wife goes upstairs to read in bed. I am standing at the living room window, wondering how much battery life I still have in my drone. I had not charged it up from last time, but I checked and found I had 2 full bars out of 4, good enough.
Sent the drone up to about 150 feet and took a look around. The images are clickable and you can zoom in on them.

The sky had potential, but I did not have enough battery life to hang around and the mosquitos had begun to notice me. Brought the drone down to tree top level and the clouds had decided to get serious. It was getting hard to slap away the state bird and fly the drone, so I brought it in.

The images were OK, not great, just OK. It is now my bed time and I head upstairs. Not a peep heard from my ankle. Just as I close my eyes, I detect lightning and hear rumbles off to the east. And that continued for at least a half hour. I find out this morning there was even an F0 level tornado, somewhere in the Twin Cities. From what I recall, F0 level winds are what we would get for day time breezes in Kansas. Perspective, like punctuation, matters.

Shakey Air returned to the skies last night. I hadn’t looked at my drone for over a month and it was sulking on top of the refrigerator, where all drones live in our house. I had been busy working on a new project, one that’s taking up just about all of my time of late. I am not sure how I came upon this idea, but it is one of those things that falls in line with my interest in photography. I remembered long ago, getting a telescope from my brother-in-law in trade for some other trinket, I guess, and that telescope brought to mind that I could lift my eyes to the heavens and view what God has created and is still mystifying scientists and astronomers to this day.

I retrieved my telescope from its resting place, brushed the dust off of it and began to contemplate what it would take to point it at the sky with a camera attached. One thing led to another, and next thing you know I’ve got electronic parts spread all over my desk with the hopes of automating the tracking of the telescope as it pans across the sky.

I have been looking around to see how to accomplish this little task on the internet, and what I have found has surprised me. The sources of information for my project pretty much dried up around 2017. These days, the guys that have done this little task, post a picture of the creation, exclaim its wonders and how cool they are for building it, and that’s it. 2018 seems to be a watershed for this change in people and the internet.

So, the drone got ignored, and if we are being frank here, Minnesota sunrises and sunsets have not quite lived up to what I witnessed in Kansas. I took a break from my puttering around with micro electronics and looked at the cloud forecast for the coming evening. It looked sparse, but I was tired of the whining that was coming from the top of the Fridge, and waited for sundown. I also stuck my Pi camera out the window to the East and told it to record the sundown. Flying the drone was easy, like it should be. I told it to lift off and then brought the drone straight up to about 200 feet and started taking images and video. What I saw was not great, but you work with what you have. The fact that with ALS, I can still fly a drone and take images of God’s creation, the glory goes to the Lord. As should everything that we do. “Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 29:2)

What we witness in the world around us and the sky above and including us, was made for God’s glory. Isaiah 43:7 “everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” Be aware of this as you see a beautiful sunrise or something you see on the internet, like what I am offering here. Give He who created you, the glory due to Him.

There were clouds and even a little color…

Here is a panorama, the West is on the left for those of you directionally impaired types, the East is on the right.

This is what my Pi camera saw. Close, but not quite a good sunset.

Here the drone is landing and being a very well behaved flying machine.

Since the Pi camera spent the night outside, I let it know it should do the sunrise, and it did.

This was taken the night of July 27th to the morning of the 28th. Stars marching across the sky. More like little pin pricks of white on a black background. We tried and we failed and will do better next time.