The roses aren’t the only flowers starting to rouse for spring. I went around the side of the house and found this:
As with the roses, this bush has been trimmed back quite a bit by the gardeners over the winter. (After I took all of the Christmas lights off of it…) But the leaves have returned and with it, one pioneering, flaming red bloom.
The humming birds are regular visitors, not just to the feeders in the back yard, but to all of the blooming plants throughout the neighborhood.
In addition to the hibiscus and rose, across the street there are fruit trees (oranges, at least, possibly others) that are just covered in tiny white blossoms now. Not only are they all covered with bees (a great thing in its own right!) but the hummers are swarming all around the neighborhood.
I had noticed this bud starting to grow over the last week, but when I went out today to get the mail I found that it had finally “popped!”
Classic form, perfect structure, beautiful color.
The only spot of color in a long row of roses that got cut back for the winter around the first of the year. Give it a couple of weeks, there will be roses of a half dozen different colors up and down the row. (When we find the “forever home,” I need to plant roses like this all along the driveway or by the front porch.)
Not noticed until I was going through the pictures for this post – a little friend hiding in the petals! Click on the image to blow it up to full-sized – can you find them?
In the middle of watching the hockey game tonight (it was good, Kings 5-0 over the Blackhawks) we got a blaring warning emergency alert, followed by the robot voice synthesizer from the National Weather Service warning about severe weather, up to and including hail, thunderstorms, and a possible tornado. WTAF?!
We didn’t get more than a few drops here, most of the action was east of Downtown LA and in the San Gabriel Valley, all thirty to fifty miles to our east. (Southern California’s a big place.)
By late tonight, the leftover remnants were over us, and with the quarter moon (that bright spot in the lower right) lighting them up from above and the light pollution from the city lighting them up from below, they looked pretty cool!
The big takeaway lesson for the evening, however, was that it’s so much harder to get down on the ground and then back up to my feet than I remember it being when I was younger. This sucks! (For the record, I was laying down on my back on the patio to try to stabalize my arms when holding my phone to take these 10 second exposures, rather than just walking inside the house to get one of the dozen or so tripods I have… Okay, so, the true takeaway is that I’m an idiot, but that’s not exactly news now, is it?)
1) Be careful to watch the partial phases of the eclipse carefully and protect your eyes!
2) If you don’t already have safe eclipse glasses and you’re going to watch the eclipse, get them now! They’ll sell out quickly.
Never look at the Sun without protection except for when it’s 100% fully eclipsed. For those 4:24 you’re going to see one of the most amazing sights in the entire Universe and you can whip those glasses off and see it in all of its naked eye glory. But for the partial phases for a couple hours before totality and for a couple of hours after totality, you MUST have protection for your eyes.
And NEVER look at the uneclipsed Sun with binoculars or any kind of magnification without special solar filters designed specifically for that instrument. You can cause permanent vision damage or loss in just seconds.
When shopping for eclipse glasses, make sure you only buy from reputable sources and manufacturers. There are reports already of many sellers on Amazon and elsewhere that are are pushing knock off glasses that don’t meet the proper standards for protecting your vision. I got mine from 2024eclipse.org. (For a package of ten I paid $27, including tax and shipping, so that should give you a good baseline for how much you should be paying.)
At the end of the day, if you can’t get certified eclipse glasses and April 8th comes and you still need a way to look at the partial phases of the eclipse, there are other options that don’t involve looking directly at the Sun. We’ll get to those another time.
I had another post and pictures all set up and ready to go. Then the sun set.
Holy freakin’ guacamole, Batman!
If you’re lucky you might get one or two sunsets a year in this part of the world that are this colorful, saturated, vibrant, and amazing.
Tonight was that night. Complete with a thin, fingernail of a three-day old crescent moon in the upper left.
Neighbors were driving by and stopping to stare with us. And why not? If you see this going on and you don’t notice or don’t care, please check for a pulse!
This spectacular display went on for over ten minutes. I even had time to shoot some panoramas.
While the purples started to fade to black up high, the reds and oranges near the horizon just got brighter and more vibrant.
All things are transient, none so much as a sunset. The planet’s just going to keep on spinning, which in the big picture is probably a good thing.
One last gasp, then the stars started popping out. Jupiter came out just above the wires, over at the left edge of the picture. Orion is high up to the left, the easiest constellation to pick out. The Plieades cluster is close to the Moon. Somewhere out there is that comet I talked about yesterday.
The tree next door has exploded with buds and baby leaves.
I took the opportunity to play with my DSLR camera, what is now a eighteen-year-old Canon that’s shot a LOT of pictures, all over the world. These days I’m noticing that the auto-focus function doesn’t work all that well, so I’m trying to use it more with manual focus.
Yes, I can (usually) do a better job of getting a picture in sharp focus, but I get one really good picture out of ten where the autofocus gets ten pictures that are about 98% in focus.
And in the process of going out to test, I got out of my office for ten minutes and looked at trees, sky, clouds, hawks, and hummingbirds. I call that a win.
I’m going to have to start putting the date into the titles on these posts. What used to be a “once or twice a year” and then became “once every couple of months” is now a “once a week or so” cadence and that’s expected to nearly double again in 2025.
The Falcon9 has just gone supersonic and through MaxQ (the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure) when it climbs over the hill from my viewpoint, 115 miles to the southeast of the launch site.
As it climbs and the air pressure drops off, the exhaust trail lengthens.
As the atmosphere gets even more thin and the plume gets longer and cooler through expansion, the colors start to change.
Just before the nine first stage main engines cut off and the first stage drops away (to land on a ship off of Baja California) the plume is a rainbow of color.
MECO! Main Engine Cut Off.
The second stage engine lights and the top part of the rocket starts accelerating toward 17,000 mph. From this far away for a night launch, the naked eye can see an orange dot moving along quickly. Binoculars or a telephoto lens will clearly show the second stage exhaust plume, a V-shaped cone stretching out behind the vehicle. Here you can see it (click on the image to see it full sized!) traveling just below the bright star Sirius.
Again, click on the image to see it full sized – the second state is passing Sirius.
And leaving Sirius behind, headed down toward the southern horizon where I lose it behind the Santa Monica Mountains.
I really need a somewhat bigger lens (this is a 70-300mm zoom, I would love to have a 600mm telephoto) and a better tripod. The good news is that with weekly launches and the cadence speeding up even more, there should be lots of opportunities for practice!
See that Sun? We’re only one day away from the new moon, so somewhere in this view is also that Moon, even if you can’t see it. (It’s probably about where the tops of those palm trees are, about 15º-ish west of the sun.)
You can’t see the Moon because it’s being seriously backlit by a freakin’ bright star, but it’s still there, creeping in its orbit closer and closer to an alignment which is perfect… But this month, they’ll miss. No part of the Sun will be blocked by the Moon from our viewpoint, and conversely, no part of the Moon’s shadow will touch the Earth.
Next month, on the other hand…
In 28 days, on April 8th, the alignment will be absolutely perfect and the shadow of the moon will swing in an arc from the Pacific Ocean toward the northeast across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, before heading out over the Canadian maritime provinces.
Yes, I’ll be there. With my son living in San Antonio, I’ll be headed to Kerrville, TX as my base, sitting right on the centerline of the path of totality with 4:24 of totality.
Yes, you’ll be hearing about it here. Probably just about every day once we get into April.
If anyone has questions, feel free to drop them into the comments. I’ll try to answer them all.
What a pleasant surprise today! I was taking a quick break and grabbing a soda in the kitchen when I saw something large-ish going through the pine trees on the slope beyond the back yard. It wasn’t any mourning dove, much larger, some sort of raptor. I grabbed a camera and headed out into the rain.
I figured that it had just been passing through and I might see it circling over the canyon someplace. It was rainy and starting to close in so I didn’t see anything in the sky. Suddenly my pattern recognition kicked in and I realized that this guy was sitting right there, staring at me.
After I got a couple of pictures from the back yard, I decided to see if the hawk would sit still while I went down the stairs to the “lower level.” To my surprise and delight, it did! Although it was giving me some serious stink eye.
I was still maybe 20-25 feet away and about even with it, although if I had tried to go over to the tree it was in I would have been 30 feet below it. That hill is steep. I guess it decided that I was mostly harmless. (I am! Mostly…)
By this point the rain was coming down steadily and while the hawk was looking all over, it didn’t seem too happy about the meteorological conditions.
What kind of hawk is it? It’s a mystery, sort of. I ran four different pictures through the Merlin Bird ID app (from Cornell Lap, get it!) and all four said it might be a Cooper’s Hawk or a Red-shouldered Hawk. In either case it’s probably a juvenile, but that’s more likely if it’s a Red-shouldered Hawk. That’s my bet, simply because the Cooper’s Hawks that I’ve seen up close have solid brown or tan chests, where these patterns are more like the Red-shouldered Hawks. I could have positively ID it if it had sounded off, their calls are much different. But not a peep was heard.
I expected it to fly off any second, but it just sat there. After about fifteen minutes I was more wet than I really liked, and I had the option of going inside. I came back out an hour later and it was still sitting there, which I found really surprising. But it was gone a half-hour after that.
I shot a couple minutes of video while waiting and hoping it would either sound off, fly away, or both. No joy on all counts, but it’s a gorgeous creature!
(Map from 
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 