Zach Schierl

Several clusters of bright pink wildflowers are back lit by the sun setting behind a ridge.

Wildflower season is in full swing! Great sunset light this weekend, but 20+ mph winds made it tough to get anything in focus!

#washington #landscapephotography #wildflowers

A photo of the nearly full moon rising over Yakima Ridge. The moon is a pleasant yellowish pink color and the background sky a warm pinkish orange. A few houses are visible on the barren hills in the foreground.

Little does it know that in a few short hours...

Honestly, I want permanent standard time just so I can stop talking about this in astronomy class...

Bringing this skeet back up because the THREE $90M each ($270M total) F-15s shot down today by friendly fire in Kuwait could pay for FOUR Chandra X-ray Observatories at full operations. Let's remember that when the 2027 president's budget request comes out soon. 🔭

A gray blue sheet of clouds visible over a college campus.

Same here but our clouds are a bit more stratus-y than yours!

I teach mostly hybrid classes and the relationship between online activity score and exam score used to be darn near linear. The last year or so it looks more like random points on a scatter plot!

That it so cool!

A bird of prey stands on a branch in a tree bathed in warm orange-pink light.

Our front yard resident hawk enjoying golden hour light earlier this evening:

I don't mind the camera angles, but the buzzing of the drones is very audible on most feeds and is driving me absolutely insane.

A shiny yellow flower with five petals sits close to the ground.

A cluster of small white, gray, and purple flowers with intricate silvery-green leaves is wedged between two rocks

First wildflowers of the season here on the east slopes of the Cascades! A couple of weeks earlier than usual. Not surprising given how mild of a winter we've had.

Yes, Yakima!

A dome shaped mountain covered in snow is illuminated by an orange pink light at sunrise. Hills and buildings are visible in the foreground.

The best thing about February (aside from the rapidly lengthening daylight hours) is that my drive to work coincides with sunrise on Mt. Adams:

...but does the class change their long-term behaviors with regard to where they get their weather info? I have no way to know. And when I reach only a few dozen students each quarter, it feels like a drop in the bucket.

I teach earth science (including some meteorology) at a community college. I hear the "weather forecasts are always wrong" line even from fellow science & math faculty! Students always seem curious and receptive to my rants about the apps...

Nice city. I spent one semester at U Otago 15 years ago. The botanical gardens are wonderful.

#ICEoutforgood protest in Yakima, WA today, hosted by #YakimaIndivisible

The full moon as seen through a 6" reflecting telescope. Several large dark gray smooth maria are visible, and a prominent crater with ejecta rays in the upper left.

First attempt at teaching my 20-month-old to look through a telescope tonight. The instinctive
lunge for the eyepiece truly has no age minimum or maximum! 🔭

A view of a city skyline bathed in pink and orange sunset light, with a snow capped conical peak on the horizon.

Going on a week straight of fog and stratus here in the Yakima Valley, but got to "escape" to the clear skies of Seattle briefly last weekend:

This sucks, I'm so sorry. I hope your institution will support you on this!

Dislike. I remember hearing the rumblings about this when we first moved there 10 years ago, and it always seemed like just a matter of time until a favorable administration gave it the green light.

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

Several slightly irregular lens-shapes clouds are back lit by the setting sun and ringed with a reddish-punk color. The silhouette of trees and power lines are visible at the bottom of the image.

Some nice lenticular clouds in the lee of Mt. Adams earlier this week...before the freezing fog set in. #wawx

Screenshot of text from a news article about ChatGPT adding...ads. Highlights: "OpenAI will never sell your data to advertisers." "Advertising will not influence the answers the chatbot provides"

Oh come on. My toddler can lie better than that.

This was a great article! While I use Atwater's animations regularly in my classes and was broadly aware of her pioneering role in plate tectonics, I learned a lot from this. Thank you!

At least it wasn't "astrology"

Quite from J Harlen Bretz inscribed on a faux-rock wall on a playground: "I could conceive of no geological process of erosion to make this topography except huge violent rivers of glacial meltwater."

A piece of belt supergroup in front of a large playground structure

Interpretive sign about rhythmites and varves

Interpretive signs on the Cordilleran Ice Sheer and Missoula Floods in front of a faux-rock wall

Fun geology find in Spokane last weekend: a geology/Missoula Floods themed playground. Complete with interpretive signs and a J. Harlen Bretz quote! ⚒️

Yes! I now understand much more viscerally why so few working class folks end up in legislatures and congress. Even a bare bones campaign is so time consuming. I wish you the best of luck!

For car camping, Takhlakh Lake is beautiful but beware the mosquitoes. Best hike/backpack is Killen Creek to High Camp on the north side. Bird Creek Meadows on the Yakima Reservation is also an interesting area, though public access varies from year to year.

I ran for a school board last fall and didn't create a campaign Facebook or Twitter. (For many reasons...this is one of them!) Neither did my opponent, but they were the incumbent. I lost. It sucks that modern campaigns are basically forced to use these awful tools to reach a large swath of voters.