Merry Christmas, everyone! I know 2018 has been a trying year for many people, so may you have a safe and happy Christmas season with family and friends and a prosperous 2019!

According to a CBC Ottawa story yesterday morning, the Rendezvous LeBreton consortium whose proposal was selected for the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats is in trouble. I am not surprised, and it seems I’m not alone.

Back in January 2016, the National Capital Commission announced two development proposals that were moving on to the next step in the evaluation process to redevelop LeBreton Flats. The proposals were put forward by two consortia: Canadensis: LeBreton Re-imagined by Devcore, Canderel and DLS Group, and Illumination LeBreton by RendezVous LeBreton Group, which is led by Senators owner Eugene Melnyk and Trinity Development Group’s John Ruddy.

The Illumination LeBreton proposal was ultimately selected. Personally, I thought at the time that was the wrong decision, something I still believe today. 

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Armistice — the end of the Great War, which was supposed to be the War to End War. While sadly that clearly hasn’t happened, we nevertheless pause to remember those people who have made the ultimate sacrifice over the years so that we have the peace, security and freedom that we enjoy today.

To them and their families I say “Thank you”.

So, unlike Morocco who just decided to opt out of daylight saving time, we are still changing our clocks in the Spring and Fall. That means that at 02:00 Sunday morning, we roll out clocks back an hour.

I’ve written about this many times in the past. The TL;DR is that setting the clocks forward and back isn’t saving us energy, actually costs money unnecessarily and results in more injuries and deaths in the week following the time change.

Well, it looks like the nice weather may be coming to an end. Or interrupted, to say the least:

TAF CYOW 171440Z 1715/1812 27018G28KT P6SM BKN040 BKN100 TEMPO 1715/1716 P6SM -SHRA 
FM172200 31012G22KT P6SM -SHSNRA BKN050 PROB30 1722/1801 2SM -SHSN 
FM180100 30015G25KT P6SM FEW060 
RMK NXT FCST BY 171800Z= 

Loosely translated, this tells us that from 6pm to 9pm, we’re probably going to see precipitation that may not be entirely liquid. It’s not going to accumulate, but it that doesn’t change the fact that it probably won’t be purely rain.

I hope I’m wrong about this and that the only thing I’m going to need my windshield wipers for this evening will be rain.

I was out at FLO last night. The viewing conditions were surprisingly good. I was showing my iOptron SkyTracker Pro to someone and decided to see how long of an exposure I could use and still have the stars as points rather than becoming little arcs. So, I set my timer at ten minutes and started the exposure.

I’m really happy with the result. You can clearly see the Andromeda Galaxy in the right half of the image and it appears that I caught a Perseid meteor almost in the centre of the frame.

The trees look kind of ghostly because the camera was tracking the stars, which causes the trees to appear to move in the image. Had I not been tracking the stars, the stars would look like arcs.

Here’s another image from the same outing that my previous Milky Way photo. This one is made up of 3 images of 5 minutes exposure, each and then some work in Photoshop. I knocked down the light pollution of Ottawa in the bottom left corner, but there’s still a bit “goo” to be dealt with.