Where was I? Oh, yes. Barcelona.

Obligatory shots of Antoni Gaudí's mind-boggling Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia (started 1880s, possibly to be finished in 2020—it's going to be much taller than this);



Interior, showing the tree-like interior columns with ellipsoid and sawtooth motifs:

Embarrassing public error messages are not just for Windows any more

( Departure monitor shows a familiar message )

Seen at Philadelphia International Airport on Oct. 7, 2005.

Color choices

JPL releases its own false-color Hyperion image that follows from considerably different artistic choices from mine.

It's not always evident how much arbitrariness there is in these composite images, and it's interesting to compare. They used a slightly different trio of filters to construct the image, and instead of producing a slightly enhanced quasi-natural image like mine, they removed the overall reddish cast and chose to emphasize subtle color differences so that you can easily see that, for instance, the walls of the big craters are bluer than the rest of the surface.

A bunch of other images have been released in the past week or so, including cool pictures of Prometheus and Pandora in context with the F ring.

Solar eclipse

We unexpectedly saw a partial but fairly impressive solar eclipse the last day we were in Barcelona. We didn't have any of those silly eclipse glasses people were hawking, but you could see it just as well in the shadows of trees:



It was apparently annular in Madrid. In Barcelona, most people who didn't hear about it on the TV news probably never noticed it, the nonlinear nature of visual perception being what it is. But it cut down the light just enough to make a walk up and down Passeig de Gracia on a sunny day that much more pleasant. It was about an automatic SPF of 4 or 5 at maximum, I'd say.