Conjunction Triad: Moon, Venus, Earth

By getting up bring-n-early Monday the 17th, I was able to capture the conjunction of three beautiful objects in space: 1) Crescent Moon, 2) Venus, 3) Earth. Well, my close proximity to that last one -- my own planet -- makes it so that I could only show a relatively small piece. So I chose a picturesque section to represent Earth: Mount Hood, silhouetted by the coming sunrise.

Although the triad is lovely, showing all of the members together required a low-detail wide shot. Here is the mountain by itself, in all its glory:



And, here is a close-up of the Moon and Venus:



An hour later, the last member of the triad -- Earth -- dominated the sky by turning it bright blue. ;-)

Immortal Hummingbird

This hummingbird visited Kathy and I while we were on vacation in Northern California, near the "Immortal Tree." (Click on the image for a bigger view.) Of course, the hummingbird did not care in the slightest about the tree nor the immortality it supposedly represented. The buzzing avian was only interested in the nectar of the colorful flowers:



Immortality from the Hummingbird Fountain of Youth! :-)