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By Jay, on May 3rd, 2012% 
The Raleigh, North Carolina area is a peneplain. The area has been devoid of any mountain building events for quite some time so the land surface has very low relief. As a result, outcrops of exposed metamorphic bedrock across the Piedmont physiographic province are few and far between. Additionally, bedrock may be covered by a literal veneer of dense soil and/or saprolite which conceals the bedrock below by mere inches.
But fear not! I am a trained geologist and have become adept at finding these obscure bedrock outcrops. So for reference, and in case anyone wants to go and visit, lets start with a map that I cobbed together.
Site Location of Bedrock Outcrop along US-401 South, Raleigh, North Carolina – photo by J. Sents, 2012
I used the Wake County iMAPS GIS [Beta] for the base layers used to create the map above. The location presents itself as an unpaved, unmarked parking lot. Along the southern edge of the lot, a stand of trees and bushes conceals the exposed bedrock. So a few days after the initial identification of this site, I made first contact with my camera and compass.
Bedrock Outcrop Photograph facing South – photo . . . → Read More: Raleigh Bedrock Outcrop
By Jay, on November 5th, 2011% Sunday November 6th, 2011 at 0200 hours [that's 2:00 a.m. to most], your clocks will have to “fall back” one hour. So 2 becomes 1. It would probably work just the same to set them back one hour before you go to bed Saturday night [tonight].
Now is an excellent time to check your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors, as well as other household battery-powered emergency alarm systems.
Finally, be sure to update the clocks in your automobiles. Be safe driving until you adjust to the light conditions, and enjoy sleeping in Sunday morning!
By Jay, on June 29th, 2011% Digital photography is like numerical computer modeling: It’s all one giant sensitivity analysis.
By Jay, on June 13th, 2011% There were a couple of small bug fixes that I just took care of on the page. I say small. However, stuff like no spaces after commas stand out to my eyes like blaze orange against lime green. Any way, it should be sorted now.
By Jay, on May 1st, 2011% I had a chance to get out, get some exercise, and check out a place I’ve been interested in geologically for some time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any prep time to look into the specifics before hitting the road. So, my trip yesterday to Hanging Rock State Park in west-central North Carolina swiftly took on a preliminary recon mode.
I managed to hike Hanging Rock Trail to the top, and then made it down to Lower Cascade Falls in the northern parcel of the park, located in Danbury, North Carolina north of Winston-Salem. I’ll study up on the geologic setting responsible for some of the structures and geomorphology before reporting back [and returning to Hanging Rock]. That should be interesting. In the mean time, please enjoy a couple of digital photographs I took at the aforementioned points of interest:
. . . → Read More: Hanging Rock State Park Recon
By Jay, on April 21st, 2011% 
I’ll have a really exciting announcement on May 2. It’s in the realm of environmental geology, hydrogeology, data management, GIS, and my all-time most favorite subject, three-dimensional data visualization and numerical computer modeling. So cool. Stay tuned!
By Jay, on April 18th, 2011% A change in the geospatial location of a facies does not necessarily impose adverse changes in the biota, environment, or geologic composition of the facies.
By Jay, on April 14th, 2011% 
Want to take better digital photographs of rocks, cars, cities, people, nature, or just about anything? Well if you read some of the articles I do, you’d better have about $30,000 handy, because you’ll need about that much to cover the costs for all the cameras, equipment, and gear I often see for suggestions. That doesn’t help a lot of us that wish they could take better photographs but can really only invest—in terms of money AND time—to the level of a point-n-shoot digital camera.
If you don’t care to capture better photographs and are content with blurry, low-quality party pics, then I suggest you support my sponsors and then close this browser for I just saved you a few minutes of valuable time. If you do seek improvement then stick around and read on. I’m going to provide you with my Five Basic Tips for Better Point-n-Shoot Photography that I believe will dramatically improve the quality and composition of your photographs in a relatively short amount of time and effort on your part. So let’s get started from the bottom up…
#5 – Know Your Camera
You have to know the ins and outs of your camera so well . . . → Read More: Five Basic Tips for Better Point-n-Shoot Photography
By Jay, on March 8th, 2011% 
Real quickly, I wanted to pass this along for any teachers interested in taking their classes on some very cool, extremely useful trips over to Historic Yates Mill County Park located just south of downtown Raleigh on Lake Wheeler Road.
Yates Mill Educators Open House 2011 – Register by march 21st
It’s geology! It’s biology! It’s hydrology! It’s engineering! The history from local Colonial Era life forward has practical relevance and implications as well. The variety of topics can be graduated to any level of student. In fact, I went on the Guided Mill Tour that’s open to the public three times last summer. No matter what the age, everyone always walked away with some good knowledge and a new understanding of just how important the mill was and still is. If I had to guess it’s because the whole park is sort of like a laboratory-slash-model, and the young ones easily stay focused.
If you are interested as an educator, you will not disappointed, so check them out! But first, go to the link below and give the nice people there a holler just to make sure they can accommodate your classes and requirements:
Yates Mill Field Trips . . . → Read More: Yates Mill Educators Open House 2011
By Jay, on February 9th, 2011% 
Looking around town ahead of some warmer weather and outdoor activities, I checked out the Wake County GIS Internet Multi Access Parcel System. A mouthful for sure. We can just call it IMAPs, or interactive maps to keep things simple here. This system is so cool for looking up places to check out geology, do some forward recon for photography, or just snooping around in general. What is it?
IMAPs is a Geographic Information Systems [GIS] interactive, web-based tool published by Wake County and Raleigh, North Carolina. I believe there may be some coordination between the municipal end and North Carolina State University and UNC Chapel Hill. What is GIS?
GIS is an approach to mapping electronic data stored in a database. It’s extremely useful because of the way things are mapped. Data are queried in a transparent fashion behind the scenes from a relational database, and then filtered, organized, and managed on individual sets of digital drawings. These drawings are referred to as layers. Think of each layer as a sheet of clear paper with one type of data drawn on it: roads for example. Another layer may have rivers. And another layer may contain land use information [wilderness, . . . → Read More: Interactive Online GIS Tool
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