A week ago we were hoping for clear skies for the total lunar eclipse, but got rain and a solid overcast. The following night however, after some of the clouds had broken up, we had bright moonlight illuminating the remaining banks of clouds up over the mountains to the north.
Spooky, but beautiful!
Filed under Photography, Weather
After this week’s rain, before the sun came back out, the light surrounding our handful of fall-colored leaves was perfect.
Now the wind and sun have returned and the leaves are mostly on the ground.
So fleeting…
Filed under Photography, Weather
The storm is gone and our democracy is still here. -Ish, at least.
As with the election, so with the weather. It can always be so much worse – and it might be any time.
But for now, we’ll take it. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” as they say, and there’s a lot of truth to that.
Tomorrow’s another day.
We fight on.
Filed under Photography, Politics, Sunsets, Weather
Early again today with a couple of quick notes and one critically important message for the day:
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Politics, Video, Weather
Posting a bit earlier in the day to give everyone who might need it a heads up. There’s a full lunar eclipse tonight.
If you’re in the US midwest or on the east coast you can see the beginning of it just before dawn. If you’re on the North American west coast (about from the Rockies west, map here) you can see most or all of it in the middle of the night. If you’re on the Asian east coast you can see most or all of it just after sunset. If you’re in Hawaii, you’re golden, you can see it all overhead at a relatively comfortable hour!
Assuming your sky is clear. Here in SoCal…
Light rain started around midnight and is supposed to go through Wednesday morning. While we’re grateful for the rain (the first measurable rain since March and we’re entering the third? fourth? fifth? year of a critical drought) the timing is less than optimal.
This is the last total lunar eclipse in about three years, so if you get a chance, take a peek!
Start times for different events:
| UTC | EST | PST | |
| First contact with umbra (the deep part of the Earth’s shadow) |
09:09 | 04:09 | 01:09 |
| 50% partial | 09:44 | 04:44 | 01:44 |
| Start of totality | 10:17 | 05:17 | 02:17 |
| Mid eclipse | 10:59 | 05:59 | 02:59 |
| End of totality | 11:42 | 06:42 | 03:42 |
| 50% partial | 12:14 | 07:14 | 04:14 |
| Final contact with umbra | 12:49 | 07:49 | 04:49 |
Remember, all you need to see a lunar eclipse (other than a clear sky or a hole in the clouds) is ye olde Mark I human eyeball. Binoculars or a small telescope might let you see more color or detail, but the naked eye works just fine. (It’s a solar eclipse that you never, EVER want to look at without protection.)
How dark will this eclipse be? How colorful? Will the moon look red, orange, brown? Who knows, they’re all different. That’s the great part of it! If you snap a picture, feel free to share it!
And that whole “signs & portents” thing where the full moon starts to turn dark and then blood red in the sky on the eve of the US midterm elections. It’s strictly a coincidence. Totally by chance. It means nothing. At all. No danger being foretold. None.
Just make sure you go out tomorrow and vote anyway, just to make sure. Seriously!
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space, Weather
There were a few clouds moving in this afternoon, a tiny chance of rain for the next day or so (and by “tiny” I mean non-zero, but so close to non-existant it’s not really funny), and when I went out I saw this quarter moon floating up there through a thin layer. “That’s a nice photo for my blog post today!” I thought. And it was.
An hour or so later, just before dinner, I saw a glow and decided to check it out.
The Halloween sunset had come and it was loaded for bear!
These rows of low hanging virga were lit up like nothing I had ever seen before.
And where the sun had gone down, it was shades of orange and red that looked like they came straight from Armageddon.
No editing on any of these. No filters. No fiddling with the hue or saturation. All straight out of the camera.
WOW! Perfect for Halloween!
And then, because of the huge hill we live at the top of, for the fourth year in a row, not a single trick-or-treater came by.
Tomorrow… November.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets, Weather
It was a good morning for playing this game!
Oh, to be a hawk and go dodging in and out of those fluffy white expanses just for the pure joy of it!
Filed under Photography, Weather
It was a dozen years ago, a cross-country trip, somewhere on I-10 in Texas.
Big clouds. Bright white from a distance, convection reaching for the heavens.
Getting darker and darker underneath, heading toward black punctuated only by lightning. Lots of that, small hail, winds that might or might not have been a tornado or at least tornado-adjacent, and sheets and sheets of rain.
It was an experience!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Those vistas horizon to horizon of golds and reds and oranges and the occasional evergreens mixed in? Maybe up in the Sierras, but not down here in the the brown, desert wastelands.
One of our fruit trees (which has NEVER had any fruit on it) is kinda sorta maybe turning a little. Most leaves are turning straight to brown, but a few are giving it the old college try. (I don’t know what old college they attended.)
If you’re fond of building a huge pile of leaves in the front yard and then running full speed and diving into them? Here you might get a big enough pile for one of the popcorn fence lizards to take a dive into, but that’s about it.
Filed under Photography, Weather
I guess that’s not 100% true – some folks got rain, up in the mountains and Antelope Valley.
We got dramatic clouds…
…and a couple of peals of thunder. No lightning that I could see, but it had to be there somplace.
Eventually we had mammatus clouds sailing overhead…
…which would indicate that we were on the bottom side of something turbulent, but it never led to anything.
Still dry.
I heard that there were Qanon lunatics trying to claim that “the libs” were using weather control technology to steer Hurricane Ian toward Florida to “punish” the Republican government and followers there. I know it’s a stretch to use logic and facts when dealing with that crowd, but did it ever occur to them that if “the libs” had that kind of technology, California wouldn’t be in a historic multi-year drought?
Filed under Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 