What a lovely evening it was. Hanging in there… I hope you’re doing the same (at least) or better!
Category Archives: Astronomy
The Back Wall As A Tripod
I still haven’t found all of my tripods out the the PODS following the move, but with the almost full Moon near the horizon a couple of days ago and the back wall there to set the lens on (and very, very short exposure times for the very, very bright moon), the results didn’t suck.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
Proof Of Life – September 06th
Damn, that was a LOT of lifting and moving and unloading and unpacking and I am SOOOOOO over all of this…
It’s a marathon – good thing I’ve run a few and trained for them. One foot in front of another…
Meanwhile, a 99% full Moon rising over the mountains looks spectacular. We know that I love sunsets, and the sunrises here aren’t bad at all. I guess we can add moonrises to that list.
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
Big Things Over The Horizon
It was a nice day here (aside from the small brush fire that they stomped on pretty quickly with a half dozen aircraft and kept to about 33 acres) but out in the desert late in the day there were a couple of odd, big, convective cells building up.
This was off to the northeast, up toward Barstow. Probably at least 40 or 50 miles away, but the cloud tops at 15,000 to 20,000 are impressive.
When we got past sunset here but the cloud tops were still lit, it got better.
There was another big group of cells down toward Palm Springs.
This extremely large, round object was also seen coming up, moving in its orbit toward a full lunar eclipse on Sunday (which we won’t see at all here – enjoy it in Asia, India, Africa, and Australia!).
Once everything on the ground started turning pink, it had risen above the mountains, clouds, and haze to become a bright, white beacon.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets, Weather
Four Seconds Of A Falcon 9 Launch
Surprisingly (I thought the desert was more dry) we had some clouds, a bit of rain, a few lightning bolts, and even a brief power outage. (When this sort of thing happened about ten days ago we never lost power even though there was an outage all over town – I figured our solar power panels had kept us online. Maybe? Maybe today there was heavy enough cloud cover so that the solar system wasn’t producing enough to cover us? I don’t know. It’s yet another learning curve.)
That was all well and good, but tonight SpaceX was launching another Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg. Having clouds covering a big chunk of the sky to the west is a problem.
Being as far away from the coast & launch as we are, the rocket never gets very high above the horizon to begin with. With clouds out there, I was lucky to see the rocket pop out through a hole in the overcast for three or four seconds just before MECO, at which point it went behind all of those clouds in the upper left and was never seen again. (The launch was perfectly fine and successful, I just didn’t see any more of it.)
Afterward, the quarter moon behind the clouds looked spooky and beautiful.
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
Perfect Alignment
I’m sure that it’s a seasonal thing, and probably will end up being for just a couple of days, probably twice a year. I didn’t notice it at all for the first four weeks we were here, but for the last day or two, just before sunset, walking down the somewhat darkened hallway from the living room toward the front door, the orange light from the setting Sun comes straight through the peep hole in the front door like a laser beam!
(Please ignore the box – I just bought a new, fancy, ergonomic office chair to try and give some relief to my back, butt, and hip. One of this weekend’s projects to assemble.)
The Sun’s shifting a bit north and south every day with the seasons, the door faces pretty much due west, the door is thick and that peephole is thin, so everything has to align just perfectly. This week is the time for the Fall Apparition!
It’s blindingly bright!
It’s our own private version of Manhattanhenge!
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home
Clear & A Couple Hundred
The monsoonal flow shifted and there was flash flooding up in the Central Valley, but it was a nice enough day here, with just the tops of a few thunderheads peeking over the horizon here and there.
Good timing too, since the thinnest sliver of a crescent Moon was back to be spotted in the evening sky.
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
Saturday Night In The New Neighborhood
There are parties going on, one next door to us and probably another at the end of the cul-de-sac. Nothing raucous or disruptive, judging from the folks parking down the block and walking past earlier it’s families & the dress code is “evening pool party.”
My favorite sound while I was out in front was the train whistle from the BNSF tracks to the southeast, down by where the Virtual Railfans camera is located. Just something about that sound, makes me want to a Steve Goodman song or something country-western.
And WOW!!! Click on that photo and blow it up to full-screen size. LOOK AT THE STARS UP THERE!!!
I had no idea they were there since I just had looked at the photo on my phone before now. You can clearly see the tail of Scorpius on the right above the street light – the two stars close together are Shaula & Lesath, with the “tail” curving down and then up to the right-top corner. To the left of Scorpius, at the top above the pink-lit house, you can clearly see the entire “teapot” of Capricorn. HOLY GUACAMOLE, BATMAN!!! Looking at the full-sized image, there’s a light spot in between the left of the tail of Scorpius and the right side of the “teapot”, and it’s right where (see that tail of Scorpius link a couple lines up, it will take you to a map!) the M7 star cluster is! Did I somehow manage to capture that in this image?!
I’m loving these dark desert skies!
I didn’t even use a tripod for this picture (handheld only, tripods & other camera gear still buried deep in a PODS unit in the driveway) nor did I use one of the good cameras, just my iPhone! I’m gobsmacked!
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
If You’re Up Before Sunrise
Last night and tonight will be the closest approach in this conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, and they’ll be slowly separating over the next month or more, but if you’re up before dawn and have a clear sky, look to the east!
At 05:25, my iPhone taking pictures through the kitchen window is having just as much trouble focusing as I was! I know how it felt!
With a little bit of effort, both I and the phone were able to focus, both in the optical and in the philosophical sense. The brighter, lower right one is Venus, the slightly dimmer, upper left one is Jupiter. With a pair of binoculars (or the time to actually put on pants and shoes, go outside, and set up a good camera and a tripod, assuming I could find one of the tripods in one of the PODS units out in the driveway) you could easily see several of the Galilean moons near Jupiter.
This was my favorite view. We have plantation shutters…
If you’re up, go look! Take binoculars! Put on pants!
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets
Full Moon Over The Backside Of Lake Arrowhead
One of these days I’m sure we’ll get up to Lake Arrowhead and get a view of the lake itself. For today, what we have from our back yard are the northwest sides of the mountains surrounding it.
You can’t see the mountains in this picture, but they’re there.
I’ll also need to get my telescopes back up and running since we have such a nice sky, but since we still haven’t found our dishes or silverware or pots & pans or sheets or most of The Long Suffering Wife’s clothes yet, getting the ‘scopes aligned might not rise to the top of the priority list this weekend.
(Credit: “Liberated” from the internet someplace, some time in the last forty years)
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 