A tiny crab snuggles into its home in an anemone. I never owned a camera capable of taking this kind of picture, so I suspect this was taken by Atti, one of our group.

Sulawesi, 2013.

From 1995, a picture of Kathy at the Royal Observatory, at Greenwich. She’s standing on the prime meridian, but the scanner’s cut off her feet so you can’t see it.

The photo may have been taken by Sue Casper or Gardner Dozois, who joined us on the excursion. We were zigzagging our way to the first Glasgow Worldcon.

We got on a ferry near Tower Bridge and cruised down the Thames, where History lines both banks of the river. In Greenwich we walked through the lovely Christopher Wren-designed Greenwich Hospital (for retired sailors) and the Royal Naval College, where back in 1980 I did research for my Privateer books.

There are actually two prime meridians, because the Astronomer Royal built a new transit-telescope 5.79 meters from the original one, and shifted the prime meridian in 1851. With the technology available at the time, the difference was not detectable.

With her astrophysics background, Kathy was very interested in the astronomical and navigational equipment on display, particularly K1 and K3, chronometers developed by watchmaker Larcum Kendall and carried to the South Pacific by Captain Cook, They were the first clocks to accurately determine longitude on shipboard (or indeed anywhere).

The trip earned back its investment, as it were, fifteen years or so later, when I revisited my photos of the observatory to help inspire the astronomy scene in Quillifer the Knight.

When we were in New York State in October, we spent half a day cruising around Ithaca, viewing Kathy’s alma mater of Cornell. We didn’t see much, because pouring rain pretty much confined us to our car. But there was one exhibit I really wanted to see, which was for some reason stuck in a corner of the Agriculture Building. With the entrance under construction, I snuck into the Ag Building through a basement door, shook the rain off my jacket, wandered through an underground labyrinth filled with humming machinery, and found an elevator to take me to the library full of volumes about winter wheat or whatever, and there found the object of my quest— Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection.

In addition to writing novels, stories, and poetry in at least three languages, Nabokov designed chess problems, taught world lit at Cornell, and collected butterflies. (It seems to have been a full life.)

The collection was something of a disappointment, because it was confined to polished Lucite boxes. Because the room was full of windows and was otherwise well-lit, the clear boxes strongly reflected the room, and it was difficult to view the butterflies through all the bright reflection.

Fortunately the exhibit also included the title pages of some of his books, featuring his own hand-drawn art.

Some years ago I visited the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, which had more examples of his art. If you were Nabokov’s wife, or a friend, he would hand-draw a butterfly on or about the title page. And if you were a lepidopterist, you would recognize the genus, but have a hard time pinning down the species, because the butterflies were imaginary. He was a good enough scientist himself to make the butterflies plausible even to an expert.

The butterfly in the pictured book is identified as morpho verae, named after Nabokov’s wife, Vera.

It was totally worth a trip through the rain.

The moon and Venus near the horizon. Earlier tonight.