Good pictures of beautiful flowers. I wonder how long it will take before they're taking over the front lawn.

Most assuredly. Low and slow, just like me, I loved that airplane. The first one was delivered to the Navy when I was in second grade.

I can smell 'em from here!

One of the few steam-trains I've seen without a diesel helper engine. Steam engines are soooo inefficient. On the other hand, we ran a pretty good economy on pure steam for over a century.

Squoosh!

Google is rich enough to hire some very clever people, some of whom are working on the problem of providing the most image for the least bandwidth.

https://www.targetinternet.com/a-complete-guide-to-squoosh-what-is-it-and-how-to-use-it/

https://www.squoosh.app

Born in 1940, I have only two memories specifically from the war: "black-out" drills (it sure is black, out) and being on the ramp of some kind of bond drive contraption on Rochester's Main Street. Rationing is a semi-memory (not an experience, but what my parents told me).

The first P2V, the airplane whose shadow is my avatar (because I was privileged to fly it for so long), was delivered to the Navy when I was in first grade.

I came of age in the 50s, last years of the punishment pregnancy. American laws governing sex were based on Vatican teachings. Bad things happened in my family.

While I was in diapers, most of Europe's "six million" were still alive. Hitler started Operation Heydrich on my second birthday, July 22 in 1942, industrially processing half a million Jews to death per month in Polish factories for half a year. (This comment violates current Polish law.) Both Stalin and Mao may have murdered more people, but they did it the old fashioned way - starvation.

"Good old days" is an oxymoron!

Started square dancing with Jerry Helt half a century ago at a folk dance camp. He did progressive squares, filling the hall with evenly spaced rows of squares. We traded partners and squares, setting him up to say, at the end, "Do you have your partner? NO-O-O! Do you have A partner? YES! Start the music."

Of course his choreography returned us to where we started and to our original partner. Pure magic to somebody like me the first time.

You beat me to it. When I first saw Faststone, I was so impressed that I sent them $25 after using it for 15 minutes. Now I can afford $50 when I upgrade. I don't see how anyone can support a website without this tool.

kpsk_sony:
Everyone DOES have a Hubble Space Telescope! It's OURS, the People's. Oh, its caretakers won't let us drive it which, at my age, is a good thing. But, you have apparently just stumbled into the vast cache of imagery that is available to EVERYBODY, at no extra charge (just pay your taxes, is that too much to ask?).

John Swanda:

Do you fully understand the meaning of the word, "arbitrary?"

We (in this thread) are just ordinary guys, I've been one for a long time. When I deal with other people, I expect to be treated as an OG. I applied for and got a PayBoo a while ago, an ordinary guy in an ordinary transaction - ask, receive.

You have been arbitrarily denied what I (arbitrarily) got. There is no good reason, it's the randomness of the universe. You cannot appeal, THEY have their rules. No, they don't care if you're inconvenienced. It doesn't matter, that card is a BAD idea, anyway, and nobody has refused you service at the grocery store or gas station.

I got my card because I wanted to save a few bucks in sales tax. It took covid 19 to smack me in the face with the truth that I, Little Danny, am defunding the police (and fire department, road department, bus service, etc.) with my stinginess. Nothing is free, we who use are obligated to pay, like it or not.

Recently, I had a bunch of seemingly unrelated problems - no sound, the video card went walkabout, new ram chips were hostile, etc. One of the responders on the video card forum suggested that I clear my BIOS by removing the battery and shorting the terminals to drain the capacitors. After I did this and replaced the battery, the BIOS started at "zero" and reset itself, going into setup on the next boot.

ALL of my problems disappeared, "Poof!" It might work for you. This was a common fix-all in the 80s and 90s.

"Unfortunately as they moved higher on the mountain, the pressure changed crushed the chip bags and gave them crumbs."

This makes no goddamn sense! As you go up, the pressure goes down. As the pressure goes down, the residual air in the bag expands, fluffing not crushing the chips. SLBSTM!

Separate Sky replacement question: Does Luminar have a "plain vanilla" sky to replace "jpeg" skies? I have a bunch of desert shots with badly striped jpeg skies I would like to fix.

"And there are those seek réclusion because after EATING people for a while you stop liking them.."

Concur. I've found too many to be bitter, leaving an unpleasant aftertaste.

I have not been there for at least 20 years, but as I remember, the original observatory was a rectangular building in the middle of a group at the west end of broad Bower or Blackheath Avenue. If you call it up in Google Earth, you can see a short, white line painted on the sidewalk in the shadow north of the middle building that extends into the sunlit plaza beyond marked by the shadows of people. That is the original meridian now at -0.001470 decimal degrees longitude (minus for west) according to Google. Mathematical zero E-W is 101.77 m east of this painted line.
G.E identifies the cross-shaped building at the bottom as the Royal Observatory.

Diagonally across the meridian plaza, you can see a square building, a "camera," which is a darkened room with a pinhole in one wall and an image of Greenwich and the Docklands on the opposite wall.

Neat place, if we can ever go back.