Enjoy a few photographs. They were taken today in San Diego a few minutes after sunset.
The western sky was fiery orange and red, making an incredible backdrop for Star of India, docked at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. The world-famous tall ship was strung with magical lights.
The sunset’s colors reflected brilliantly from the park’s watery fountain and a slice of San Diego Bay in the distance.
Truly awesome!
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This evening, before the Spreckels Organ Pavilion’s Classic Rock Band’s concert featuring music of The Beatles got started, I walked a bit. I meandered around Balboa Park and took these photographs.
The sun was setting. Here and there building lights were appearing. The Spreckels Organ Pavilion was jammed with concert-goers. A few people were walking down El Prado, or by the Botanical Building as the sky gradually darkened…
The music began…
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
This mural in Oceanside is one of the coolest I’ve seen!
The artwork is painted on the side of Security Public Storage on South Coast Highway. It celebrates all things Oceanside!
The mural contains images of surfers by the Oceanside Pier, local Chargers hero Junior Seau, Oceanside Harbor’s faux-lighthouse, the famous Top Gun house and nearby Camp Pendleton.
Sunset colors over a beach perfectly capture the SoCal lifestyle.
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
The newly opened Sweetwater Park on Chula Vista’s bayfront has a very unique architectural feature.
At one end of the public restrooms a sheltering roof contains an oculus. What’s an oculus? It’s a circular opening that allows natural sunlight to shine through.
During the day, the oculus casts a circle of light on bands in the concrete underfoot. You can see those curving bands in the above photograph.
By observing the light’s movement along the bands, Earth’s rotation can be tracked, as the sun “rises” in the east and “sets” in the west. Depending on the season of year, and the angle of the sun’s path through the sky, the projected light will follow a particular band.
On the wall is an explanation…
The Theory of the Seasons.
The Earth’s rotation axis is tilted by 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic and is always pointed to the celestial poles as the Earth moves around the Sun. Sometimes the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun and the Sun’s rays hit the Northern Hemisphere at a shallow angle.
The Summer Solstice marks the beginning of Summer and is the longest day of the year, just as the Winter Solstice marks the beginning of Winter and is the shortest day of the year.
The Equinoxes; Equi meaning Equal, and Nox meaning Night, telling you that the day and the night are of equal length. This occurs when the Sun is directly over the Equator, in between the two Tropics and occurs around March 21st and September 23rd marking the beginning of Spring and Autumn.
If this sounds like a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo, fortunately there’s an illustration to help one visualize the concept…
Now consider my next photograph.
On June 21, as the summer begins, the sun will be at its highest in San Diego, here in the Northern Hemisphere.
Because of this, the sun’s light projected through the oculus will come from a high angle, and follow the lower band as Earth turns and the day progresses.
It just so happened that I visited Sweetwater Park on June 18. I arrived at the oculus a little after noon.
You can see the circle of light is almost atop the June 21 band, and is now to the right of the central drain, past the 12 PM mark.
The light would continue to move right along the same band as the sun descends in the sky toward the horizon.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
I performed an experiment today. I asked the AI Drawing Assist on a Samsung Galaxy phone to create artistic images of “Balboa Park at sunset.”
Well, the AI, as you can see, produced some rather bizarre results!
Sure the towers and facades appear superficially like those in Balboa Park, but take a close look. The configurations of buildings, towers, fountains and reflecting pools are truly weird.
In the above photo, why are two towers side by side? Why is the pool located where it is, and so curvy? Why is there a big mountain in the background? Low mountains in reality are far to the east, and Balboa Park’s grand entrance at the California Quadrangle is to the west where the sun sets.
Why is image construction so apparently arbitrary?
It all makes me wonder: How exactly are these images generated? Is there no accurate reference to countless photographs on the internet? Is the AI just too primitive at this point in its development? Is it capable of creating only fantasy worlds? Someone out there with technical expertise might expound on this.
Of course, when the AI images are created, the user is cautioned: Image generation may produce unexpected results. No kidding!
Here are more bizarre examples. The only prompt I used was “Balboa Park at sunset.”
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
This unique memorial was created several years ago in La Jolla, on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography campus. Words on a circular plaque read: IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DONATED THEIR BODIES TO SCIENCE – UC SAN DIEGO SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.
Walk down the Coastal Meander Trail, look for two benches above the beautiful Pacific Ocean, and then look for this memorial.
The memorial plaque points to where the sun sets during the Winter Solstice, Spring/Autumn Equinox and Summer Solstice. A quote on the plaque, by Carl Sagan, reads: We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
Families remembering loved ones who gave their bodies to further scientific knowledge can sit on the benches and enjoy a sunny day, and watch a beautiful sunset over the wide ocean.
You can read more about the UC San Diego School of Medicine Body Donation Program Memorial Site by clicking here.
UPDATE!
I took the next photo during a later walk…
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
This series of photographs attempts to capture the magic of the “golden hour” along San Diego’s Embarcadero. This evening, about an hour before sunset, I walked south from the Maritime Museum of San Diego to Tuna Harbor.
As the sun approached the horizon across San Diego Bay, its light reflected from downtown’s many windows, creating a magical scene.
When San Diego’s blue sky contains big fluffy clouds, the drama is heightened! The weather experts say a small storm is approaching–showers late tonight.
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
M5, the world’s largest single-masted yacht, is presently docked at the 5th Avenue Landing superyacht marina behind the San Diego Convention Center.
M5 stands out from the other nearby superyachts. Its mast is so incredibly high, M5 cannot pass under any bridge that she can navigate to! That includes the San Diego-Coronado Bridge!
Read about the amazing yacht, which periodically visits San Diego, here.
This evening as the sun began to set, my walk along the south Embarcadero took me past M5. So I captured these photographs…
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter)!
An amazing mural depicting wildlife was created earlier this year at SDG&E Park in Chula Vista. The artists of Ground Floor Murals, assisted by students from nearby Castle Park High School, painted a sunset scene filled with beautiful wildlife!
You might recall that several incredible Padres baseball murals visible in communities around San Diego were also painted by Ground Floor Murals.
This very colorful work of art can be found on the side of a building in San Diego Gas and Electric Park near Hilltop Drive.
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