Category Archives: Astronomy

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.

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.

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!

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)

July 1st, what? We’re opening escrow? Gee, it’s a great house, I’m glad that The Long Suffering Wife loves it, as do I, but really?! A 21-day escrow?

August 1st, we’ve been in here eleven days and all is still pretty much chaos, boxes almost everywhere, and yet… There’s a lot more order and organization that there was after the previous move, seven years ago. I still have to empty the rest of the contents of the two PODS storage units, but that’s progress for another day. Today I finished emptying out the second UHaul truck of this week. While my hands and arms and legs and back and butt and shoulders are all pretty much one giant cramp 24/7/365, I am feeling a certain sense of accomplishment. Despite my current age and condition (i.e., “I am WAAAAAY too old for this shit!”) it is getting done.

And the sky here! Instead of having a street light right in front of the house and then about every third house all up and down the street and being in the middle of a brightly lit metropolitan area that’s in the top twenty or so on the planet, we have just two, one at each end of our cul-de-sac, at least three or four houses away. And our street and subdivision is located in an area that’s about 1/20 as densely populated as Los Angeles. As a result, YOU CAN SEE THE STARS! It’s not a “Bortle 1” location by any means, but a Bortle 6.4 location is tons better than a Bortle 8.4 location, and from here Bortle 4 locations are less than an hour’s drive away.

Just with my cell phone camera, looking out my front door toward the southwest tonight, the quarter Moon was setting over the palm tree, and to the left above the garage room you can clearly see the stars at the “head” of Scorpius. (Go ahead, click on the image, I’m giving you the uncompressed file and it’s amazing!)

Antares is the brightest star (second from the left edge) with the “head” coming down vertically to the right near the center of this image. (Click! Click! See all of the detail!)

Wait until I get my telescope put back together. (“Funny” story there with the movers…)

I missed posting last night. It’s called “total exhaustion,” and “Paul can’t estimate how long packing and moving will take within an order of magnitude!”

Here’s the crescent moon tonight.

I’ll bet it looks amazing from our new house in the High Desert, but I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see. I’m obviously still at the old house, packing yet another truck full of stuff.

It’s an “adventure!!” One I wish would come to an end and let me get back to a boring routine. “Mundane” has become a short-term life goal!