Photos: November 2009 Archives

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an hour it took to accumulate the photographs, the camera caught five meteors, enough to show how they radiate out from the constellation Leo—from which the shower gets its name. Away from the pollution of city lights, more meteors would have been visible.

              

The Santa Claus Parade was started by the now-defunct Eaton’s department store in 1905 with just one attraction: Santa. This year, on Sunday, November 15, the parade will feature twenty-six floats, twenty-one bands, and more than a million pieces of candy. To get a sneak peak at this year's edition of the one-hundred-and-five-year-old parade, Torontoist visited its Weston-area workshop last Thursday and talked to the people behind the magic—including the big man himself.

                                   

Sure, there were bound to be a zillion Lady Gagas—and there were—but Halloween exhibitionism on Church Street is still one of the city's most enjoyable annual events. Here are some of our favourite costumes from 2009, featuring loads of blood, pop culture, and plenty of ghoul-on-ghoul action. We should note that a couple of these photos may be NSFW (if you work in a convent).