Entering the doldrums

 This morning was super clear.  I set up the little phone holder tripod John put together for all Physics faculty when we had to teach remotely this year, and took about 50 shots of Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san, as it is called here) with the intent of practicing some image averaging to see if I can't get a clearer picture.  I'm not sure how well it worked.  I used Gimp, which is like an open-source version of Photoshop.  The top image is one of the pictures from the camera.

 And this is an "averaged" image.

The averaged image is 2.5 times the size in memory (5 MB compared to 2 MB), but I'm not sure it's 2.5 times the clarity.  Or even 1.6 times the clarity (square root of 2.5, since total number of pixels has to be split amongst the two dimensions somehow).  If you download them and zoom in you can see the mountain is a bit clearer in the bottom image, but not a huge amount.  It might be because I can only pull jpg images from the phone, and these have some smoothing and compression on them to begin with.  This means the noise in a single picture is averaged out by examining neighboring pixels.  Ideally I'd pull the raw images from the phone and average those.  I have a separate set that I took without the tripod and a bit zoomed out.  These are larger files, but that might not matter.  It's something to pass the time.

I'm channeling Helen and Karen from church.  Today I made some butterflies, flowers, and a bunny.

These will make small gifts for people as I need them.  Provided they are acceptable, that is.  I have an Altoids tin that's about half full of them.  I also have some in red and some in white.  Some of the flowers have white or yellow centers to contrast the petals.  When I finish this post I'll be practicing the origami box I posted about before.  (Also brought a bit of Tom from church with me.)  Last night I figured out how to make the walls different heights.  I'll make some as boxes and some as lids.  Maybe that will be decent as wrapping.  Add it to my list of things I need to ask about. 

5 more nights here.