Comet of the Century Smackdown: Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (2024) v. NEOWISE (2020)

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) from south of Peterborough, Ontario: October 19, 2024

You always have to take media reports about full moons and comets with a grain of salt: super moons aren’t all that super, blue moons aren’t blue, and comets of the century usually aren’t. This year’s “comet of the century,” Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS wasn’t visible to my unaided eyes any night this week in Toronto. It’s possible that other people had more luck. The comet was super-easy to pick out in binoculars, with the added benefit of being visible from our front window—I didn’t even have to go outside to see it! On Wednesday evening there were a couple of dozen people at the Chester Hill lookout chatting excitedly and armed with all manner of compact telescopes, cameras, and binoculars trained on the same corner of the sky. Tonight’s picture was taken in the darker skies of East Dodgeville.

Scores for Tsuchinshan-ATLAS:

Cool factor of being able to see a comet in light-polluted city skies: +5

Bringing out the community: +2

Viewing from inside the house (no-pants bonus): +1

Lack of unaided-eye viewing: -1.5

Overall Comet of the Century score for Tsuchinshan-ATLAS: 6.5

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) from the same location: July 15, 2020

Comet NEOWISE from 2020 is the defending champion for Comet of the Century. Because of the timing of this one, I didn’t have a chance to see it from Toronto skies. One big difference between NEOWISE and Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is that the former was easily visible to the unaided eye at a dark(ish) sky site. It was definitely the brighter comet, with both head and tail visible without binoculars or a long camera exposure.

Scores for NEOWISE:

Unaided-eye viewing: 9

Overall Comet of the Century score for NEOWISE: 9

Yeah, there’s just the one score for NEOWISE, because really, what else would a comet of the century be if not immediately in your face when you look up? With NEOWISE, you needed to know where to look, but once you saw it, you couldn’t lose it again.

Comet of the Century winner, and still undefeated: NEOWISE.

Bring on the next contender! Seeing comets never gets old.

AJ who’s-that-now?

Big ol' Cadillac with licence plate AJBILLES parked at Canadian Tire

It’s not every day in the 21st century that you see a late-70s Cadillac (Google image search claims 1977 Sedan DeVille) with impeccable spoked wheels and whitewall tires parked in the parking lot at the local Canadian Tire. Spotting one with that licence plate though? Maybe the boss picking up some Armor All?

(Not the first time that someone took notice of this specific car elsewhere in the same lot.)

(Also not the first time that I’ve looked too closely at licence plates.)

The Ring

The Ring in Montreal

Tootling around Montreal last month, we were delighted to come across The Ring, an enormous metal circle hung between two buildings at Place Ville Marie. It was designed by Claude Cormier, who passed away last year. He left his mark on Toronto with such notable landscapes as Sugar Beach, Berczy Park, Love Park, and too many others to do justice in this space.

It’s funny how something as simple as a metal ring is made extraordinarily striking by size (30 metres) and position (suspended in mid-air between two buildings). This kind of monumental whimsy is what makes good cities great cities. More, please!

Eclipse 2024

Risa (and a couple of dozen other people not in frame) taking pictures of the blazing horizon during totality.

Risa and I made the drive out to Presqu’ile Provincial Park to catch the eclipse on the shore of Lake Ontario today. The show was mostly out of view, with clouds fully obscuring the sky from a couple of hours before the moon took its first bite of the sun until after totality was over. We did get the experience of transitioning to twilight during totality, which brought an unexpected surprise: looking south over the lake, virtually the entire horizon looked like it was on fire compared to the dark clouds and water.

As soon as the light started returning after our 2-plus minutes of totality, most of the people who’d spent hours waiting and watching by the shore with us started packing up and leaving, like jaded Blue Jays fans trying to beat the traffic home after the 7th inning. And sure enough, they missed the late-game rally: the sun finally peeked out from behind the clouds several times during the back half of the eclipse.

The sun peeking out from behind the clouds and moon after totality.

It wasn’t the show we’d been hoping for but was still an enjoyable afternoon in the park with some unexpected surprises.

Cycling to Canada’s Wonderland

My co-workers and I headed up to Vaughan for a day of funteam-building exercise at Canada’s Wonderland last week. Like all kids in the ’80s, I used to go to Canada’s Wonderland every year—but always by bus or car. But now that Canada’s Wonderland is surrounded by suburbs rather than farm fields, I thought that maybe I should ride my bike up there, through the city all the way. Everyone I mentioned my plan to thought I was crazy. “They don’t like bikes up there,” was the typical response, usually accompanied by a slow head shake as if they were warning me to stay out of a rowdy bar. But hey, if I can’t ride to the rides, I don’t want to go. Besides, I regularly ride the mean roads of suburbia when I go on long-distance rides out of the city. Still, this felt different. I needed a bit of planning.

So I started with an email to Canada’s Wonderland customer service:

Hi,
Do you have any bicycle parking?
Val

The response came a couple of days later:

Hello Val,
Thank you for contacting Canada’s Wonderland. Unfortunately, we do not offer bicycle racks to lock your bike with.
I hope this helps, please do not hesitate to contact us again.

Well, no, it doesn’t help. Not at all. So I replied:

Seriously? One-third of the park is given over to a parking lot for cars and there isn’t a single bike rack there somewhere?

I didn’t receive another response. Well, this isn’t off to a good start.

But as with many things, It’s Google to the rescue: Street View goes right into the park! I started looking for bike racks and found one just outside the main gate:

wonderland-bike-rack

The only problem? The Street View was taken in 2011 and this particular spot is now consumed by supports for a giant roller coaster—a leviathan, if you will—that spills out into the parking lot:

wonderland-bike-rack-probably-not-here

Huh. Maybe customer service was telling the truth. I mean, it didn’t look like the bike rack was all that well used in 2011, and if they put a support post right through the spot that hosted said rack, they may not have replaced it. But wait just a second! If you zoom in as far as you can, you can sort of see the faint outline of not one, but two bike racks between the support posts, each with a lonely bike hanging off it:

wonderland-bike-rack-maybe-here-after-all

All right, it looks like we’re back on! I loaded up directions in Google Maps, finessed it a bit for my preferences, and loaded this relatively direct yet incredibly twisty route into my GPS:

After all of the warnings from friends and family, after the assurance from customer service that I wouldn’t find a bike rack, and after the satellite-fuelled research, I set out on a sunny morning last week to meet my teammates at the theme parkconference center for our day of thrill ridesimportant meetings.

And you know what? The ride was actually really nice! A surprisingly large portion of the route north of the 401 is on trails through parks. By far the worst part was riding on Bayview between Lawrence and York Mills, a stretch of road I’m all too familiar with. Even the relatively short ride along car-friendly highway Rutherford Rd in Vaughan wasn’t bad in comparison. The only glitch I encountered was some construction that closed part of the bike trail, forcing me out onto Dufferin to get past the 407. There’s a beautiful bike lane on Dufferin north of Steeles that, sadly, ends just when it would be most useful: crossing the 407.

And so, less than two hours after setting out from Broadview & Danforth, I rode past Maple High School and into the parking lot at Canada’s Wonderland where the bike racks were exactly where Google Maps said they would be:

20170825-bikes-parked-at-canadas-wonderland

Would I do it again? Absolutely! It’s no worse than any other ride out of the city, and the joy of riding through a gargantuan parking lot to my—free!—parking right beside the entrance is always one of the joys of cycling to a destination. That said, the ride reinforced a long-standing problem with cycling infrastructure in and around Toronto: the optimum route is so hopelessly convoluted that you couldn’t hope to follow it without a good GPS and/or mapping app. If you want to get there in a car, you can just hop on the 400 and follow the signs; wouldn’t it be great if there was a signed route from the Finch hydro corridor to Canada’s Wonderland? The route is already there; now we just need the signs. Instead, you’re left cycling on a dead-end street, hoping that the GPS is right and there’s a trail at the end (there always was). Or assuming that the barely-visible gravel path beside the driveway actually goes somewhere (it did). As good as the ride was, it shouldn’t take so much effort to figure it out and keep track of it while you’re on the go.

Driving to work for Halloween

After considering a variety of costumes for my workplace Halloween celebrations (held on Friday last week), I decided to dress up as a car driver. I mean, what better costume could there be for a cyclist? I figured that it would be an easy enough costume to make and wear, given that drivers look (more or less) like normal people. For inspiration, my mind went to a time when driving was glamorous instead of a dehumanizing chore. I decided that I’d try to look like I was driving a roadster in the 1920s. It was still a pretty simple costume, requiring just an aviator’s hat, some goggles, and a long white scarf. This is what I came up with after poking around the closet for the scarf, Etsy for the hat, and Lee Valley Tools (of all places) for the insanely great goggles:

Val as old-time car driver

Val as old-time car driver

All that was left was the car. Now obviously, I don’t have an old roadster lying around, so I had to buy or make one that I could take to work for costume day. Oh, and did I mention that I wanted to make the 10 km commute by bike, the way that I always do? Three weeks, eight trips to Home Depot, three visits to Lee Valley, and two online orders later, this is what I ended up with:

Val's retro roadster

Val’s retro roadster

 

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Steep (steep!) hill ahead

Along the Finch hydro corridor, these signs warn cyclists of an 80% grade hill coming up:

Bike on very steep hill sign

That’s one steep hill!

Wait a second, that can’t be right. That’s looks like they’re warning you that path goes straight down the face of the Scarborough Bluffs. But I just rode up this hill and I’m sure I would have remembered if it had actually been that steep. Let’s try a little head tilt:

 

2016-09-15-steep-hill-fixed2-1520120

Yeah, that’s more like it. Toronto signs, the latest in a continuing series.