Drizzly & damp & cool. It never started raining hard enough to get the tree trunk in the back yard totally wet, but there was a dark water stain from where the water was draining down from the branches.
I’ve heard some folks are referring to these tiny moments of joy as “glimmers,” or “micro-joys.” It’s a little bit of a froufrou term, but I’m mellowing a lot in my old age.
These days we can all use as many glimmers as we can find. Look for yours!
Filed under Critters, Photography, Weather
When we were at the Music Center for the play at the Taper on Saturday, I got this view of City Hall across from the fountains in the center of Jerry Moss Plaza.
In the summer there will be kids out there playing chicken as the fountains pop up and down. In the low 40’s and windy, the crowds dancing in the water were smaller.
Filed under Critters, Los Angeles, Photography
Another “atmospheric river” is moving into Northern California and they’re expected to get clobbered this week – we’re going to catch the edge of it in SoCal, but it should still give us more than an inch of rain over three or four days. Let’s hope it’s gentle and doesn’t produce any mudslides or floods in the recently burned areas.
In advance of that storm, the sky was covered this afternoon with thin, high, wispy, icy clouds.
Looking toward the Sun as it was getting near the horizon, 22° of arc out, just above the roof and trees to the southwest, there was a rainbow-colored sundog.
Red on the sunward side, blue on the outside, there was probably another one on the opposite side of the Sun, but hidden by the house here.
There are some truly amazing images out there of extremely bright sundogs on opposite sides of the Sun, along with a 22° arc around the Sun. It’s all caused by the sunlight being scattered by the high altitude ice crystals, but watch out for fake and AI-generated images. It seems to be a favorite topic for fakes, probably because most folks don’t know what they really look like and get fooled.
When being awed by natural wonders, insist on the real thing!
Filed under Astronomy, Critters, Photography, Weather
I don’t know if Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow or not.
Here, we had enough clouds to make sunset spectacular, with the crescent Moon now well above the brilliant Venus.
Let February begin.
Filed under Astronomy, Critters, Photography, Sunsets
That’s a classic line for a title, but a highly inaccurate one. While there are stars in view, the bright objects are not stars, but planets and our Moon.
When I first went out it reminded me of several symbolic scenes from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (If there’s a giant 4x9x16 black alien obelisk floating out there to do something amazing and save the human race from our own incredible stupidity, NOW would be a good time! Just saying…)
The super bright object in the middle (and the upside down internal reflection from the iPhone camera above and to the left) is obviously the Moon. It’s a three-day old, 9% illuminated crescent that’s just stunningly gorgeous hanging there (see that upside down, reflected image) but still far brighter than anything else in the sky outside of the Sun.
The next brightest object, center top, is Venus, the third brightest object in the sky. It will be there for another couple of months in the evening sky. Tomorrow night the Moon and Venus will be even closer, if not lined up like a movie special effects shot. (Look for it yourself just after sunset!) We’ll see if we can see it here in LA, the weather’s supposed to be getting cloudy.
(Image: Star Walk app for iPhone)
I was curious if the bright object just above and to the left of the Moon was another internal reflection or not, but it’s apparently Saturn. I knew that it was out there, but in the twilight and slight haze (which also is making that halo around the Moon) I couldn’t see it with the naked eye. But no, that’s got to be Saturn that the camera’s picking up with a long exposure.
Not seen, but also there, is Neptune, just to the left of Venus. I might be able to pick it out as a pinpoint with my 8″ telescope (Venus and Saturn will show visible disks, Saturn’s rings would be clearly visible) and it might show some blue color, but the iPhone doesn’t have a chance.
Taking even longer exposures (this is 20 seconds, the longest my iPhone 13 will do) under the landing approach to Burbank Airport can lead to other visual visitors becoming prominent. That’s a private Cessna 550 Citation coming into Burbank at 3,725 feet and 127 knots.
And one other thing I notice in looking at these images on the big computer monitors instead of on the iPhone – take a look (full-sized images) at the Sky Walk image. Immediately to the left of the symbol for Neptune, there’s a quadralateral of four dimmer stars. You can see where Neptune is centered about midway between Venus and that quadralateral of stars. Now look at the full-sized image above, and there’s that quadralateral off to the left of Venus.
Can you see Neptune in there? Was I wrong above about the iPhone being able to pull it in? There are two very, very dim objects, one closer to the quadralateral and just above the wires, the other higher and closer to Venus. Could one of those be Neptune?
Zooming in as far as the Sky Walk app will take me, it might be the lower one, near the wire.
Intriguing…
Filed under Airshows, Astronomy, Critters, Photography, Space
Similar sunset to yesterday (they’re never quite identical) but this time looking to the east at the pines in the back lit up.
I wish the photo portrayed the vividness of the light half as well as it appeard to the eye.
We may safely blame the photographer, not Mother Nature, for the discrepancy.
Filed under Critters, Photography, Sunsets
It’s been a while. Between one thing and the other I haven’t been out much at any time of the day except to retrieve the mail and take out the trash, let alone going out at the correct time.
Nothing fancy – simple, straightforward, beautiful.
No Moon out there tonight – the first New Moon of the year means that it’s the beginning of the Lunar New Year! Happy Year of the Snake!
Venus is still out there like a diamond. When it gets a bit darker, Saturn’s visible a bit below it. When it’s fully dark, you’ll see Jupiter, almost as bright as Venus, straight overhead. And back toward the east rom there’s Mars, not quite as bright but very, very red.
Enjoy!
Filed under Critters, Photography, Sunsets
I’m going to assume that it’s bright red like that in celebration of the Chiefs win yesterday and their upcoming Superb Owl appearance with a chance to become the first team to win a “three-peat” in that event.
Right?
No?
Filed under Critters, Health, KC Chiefs, Photography
Trying to cram about two weeks of work into two days, it’s been a long weekend. And then this starts happening again, pretty much just like last weekend.
Not as high as last weekend, and the worst of the chills have stayed away, but I still would have preferred to te a 24 or 48 hour nap instead of a 24 or 48 hour cram session for our Budget meeting tomorrow.
Lessons learned while training and running marathons in the past have come in handy – sometimes when you really, really want to just sit down and rest and drop out, you need instead to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, regardless of the circumstances.
Or “Set SCE to AUX!” Same.
Filed under Critters, Health, Photography
We get three & four years of severe drought. Water rationing. Extreme limits on watering the lawn (unless you’re a golf course owned by a billionaire). Lawn, open areas, trees, all get brown and dry and ready to burn. We get brush fires.
Then we have two years of above-average rain. Good, now we can water the dirt in our yards. Everything out in the wildlife areas gets green and lush.
Another year of drought. All of that new green growth gets brown and dry and extremely flammable. We burn again, tens of thousands of acres in four major and a dozen-plus minor fires all over the city and county and Ventura County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, San Diego County… An area the size of New England is on extreme fire watch for weeks, THOUSANDS of homes and businesses are gone.
Mind you, because they’re not in the news every night, most people think those fires are out and done. They’re not. They’re just more or less contained and not threatening any more structures and homes. But as of right now the 23,448 acre Palisades fire is still only 85% contained. The 14,021 acre Eaton fire is at 95% containment.
Oh, good, here comes a few days of rain. That will help put out the fires.
Well, yes, it will, but…
This will be a “good” rain in that it should be mild, less than an inch of rain total over three days combined, with relatively little chance of any big downpours or thunderstorms with lightning, which could start new fires.
But we now have something on the order of 50,000 acres locally that’s newly burned, most of it in canyons and steep hillsides, and any hard rain will start to cause mudslides and flooding. Barren hillsides will erode like crazy with nothing left in the way of brush and trees to hold the topsoil together. It’s time for the next disaster in the chain!
On the other hand, listening to the rain in the night and smelling the petrichor is wonderful.
Filed under Critters, Disasters, Los Angeles, Photography, Video, Weather
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 