Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Deloro, Family, Butterflies and Stars
Had a nice trip up to Deloro, playing with Annie for much of the way up, and was clearly tickled to have her Dad finally go "hiding in the woods" with them.

There was no rush to get there for once, so we had lunch at a Dairy Queen in Peterborough, memorable because of the first movie I shot with the new camera, with Annie in front of a large fish tank they have there. Once she realized I was taking a picture of her she told the "yellow fishy" on the other side of the glass from her to "say cheese". We also stopped at the playground in Marmora that both girls had long wanted to play at. It featured several pieces of playground equipment now considered too dangerous for use in any of the city playgrounds I've seen – like teeter-totters without any springs to cushion a hard bounce, and a small metal spinner. Our girls loved them of course, both of them getting happily dizzy on the spinner, as Erika and I watched them like hawks, making sure neither of them accidentally spun themselves into orbit.

The sky was bright, relatively cloudless and for the season and place, warm. No nasty biting bugs as yet, unless you count the few undoubtedly starving ladybugs, who seemed more dazed than hungry, awakening a little too early from their hibernation, emerging groggily from the small cracks and insulation in the house that they had stuffed themselves into during the cold months of winter. A more resplendent companion appeared on the insides of the flyscreens, which turned out to be Compton Tortoiseshell butterflies which are relatively common up north. Jean had a guide about butterflies and moths common to the Algonquin Park area, and I discovered that this large-ish butterfly (roughly the size of Monarch) also rather improbably manages to stuff itself into the cracks of houses such as this one, and manages to successfully overwinter, as had the ones I managed to photograph with my new digital camera.

What I was most looking forward to was setting up my telescope in the evening to do some planet-watching in the dark, dark skies up at Deloro. The clear sky of the day were matched by an equally clear nighttime sky. Venus was stunningly brilliant, and though I thought it bright enough to possibly cast a shadow, I couldn't detect the effect. Jupiter was high in the sky as well, and I could easily see three of its four moons (the fourth was behind the massive planet). My little telescope doesn't show much in the way of detail for Jupiter itself, though it was enough to make out that Jupiter itself is a slightly flattened disc. I ended up concentrating on the planets, but along the way caught sight of a couple of nameless satellites zooming across the dome of the sky, and a couple of stray meteors. It ended up being a great night for observing.