From the way the  main stream media is hyping this storm, you’d think we’d never seen a big  snow storm before. That said it does sound like the biggest snow storm we’ve seen in some years.  The NOAA Graphical Weather site gives a pretty good picture of what to expect late this afternoon and tonight: blizzard conditions, high winds, and snow. Lots of snow. Stay safe.

I accompanied David Hodsdon on a jaunt up into the (DRAINED) meadow at the northwest
end of Clary lake yesterday afternoon to check it out and take some pictures. I took pictures of David as he used his Gigapan Robotic Camera Platform to take pictures of the meadow. The Gigapan is designed to take multiple images with a regular digital camera which are then combined into a panorama. It was neat to watch as it panned around the horizon snapping pictures without intervention. The camera is a Nikon D7000 digital camera and a wide angle lens (want one). The wide angle lens resulted in a 360° panorama only 1200 x 240 pixels (mine is more than twice that size). The other one he sent me I’ve cropped slightly and added it to the random pool of pictures used as  site banners.  Both have been added to the Winter 2013 album.

In other news… the lake level has again fallen to -60″ below the top of the dam. I’m not entirely happy with the page layout of the Water Level Chart, the chart is really too small when constrained to fit in the primary column. So when I get a chance I’ll dig into the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, supposed to make web page design simpler?) and design a better looking page.