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!
Kerrville is expecting somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 visitors for the day of the eclipse. It’s going to be a madhouse.
To get a room there a four-day minimum was required, non-refundable, and at somewhere between three and five times the normal hotel rates. Ye olde “supply & demand” at work!
I’ll be driving out from Los Angeles, about twenty hours of driving, but over three days. That should give me sufficient slack to allow for any unexpected issues or detours.
I didn’t even think about flying out and getting a rental car – those reservations were pretty much booked and overbooked months ago.
In order to take that time off of work I’m going like a banshee now to try to not only keep up with my current workload but to get ahead and stay ahead for when I leave. (No good deed…)
So, a marathon, to have my butt and hopefully a trunk full of camera gear in a sunny spot in central Texas in the early afternoon twenty-seven days from now.
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!
This one is actually from a week or so ago – today was clear and “boring” as colors and clouds go.
This one didn’t start with a lot of color, but the clouds and definition in the structures was exceptional.
As always, the silhouetted palm trees were splendid.
We finally got to see a little bit of color.
And more shadows of cloud on cloud. So freakin’ gorgeous. Tell me, how often do you look for something like this in your busy life? If it’s happening, how often do you spend ten minutes just watching? If the answer to either question is “never,” you might need to re-evaluate your life choices.
We’re looking hard a houses up in the high desert someplace. The sunsets and sunrises there can be even more spectacular (see these, for example), but I hope I can find a place with a couple of palm trees to add some character to that horizon while the sky’s doing tricks.
When “Dune” came out three years ago we went to see it in IMAX on the last day it was there in the big screen format – and the projector was broken. So I don’t take anything as a sure thing.
(The good news was that we got our money back, of course, and also got six or eight comp tickets. We also did eventually get to see it in IMAX when it made another pass through a month or two later, plus again about two weeks ago.)
Tonight’s only Day Three of the new movie’s run, and even if tragedy were to somehow strike twice (highly unlikely!) there will be plenty of other opportunities.
No, so far the biggest tragedy tonight looks to be that they’re sold out of the bizarre sandworm popcorn bucket toppers. I sort of wanted one – but I’ll live.
I was fortunate this evening to get a quick heads up from a good friend that the sunset going on outside at the moment was “epic.”
She wasn’t wrong! It had been vascillating between damp, showers, rain, and downpours all day, but being back in “damp” mode (it’s raining again now) meant that some sunlight was getting through.
Then, about two minutes later, these spectral vapors just materialized out of thin air.
The air was saturated with moisture, cool, and apparently right on the edge of condensation into clouds.
Some small eddy or disturbance, probably with a breeze coming up the canyon and getting some lift, cooling and spinning just a bit, caused these to puff into visibility.
A stray late sunset, pink and orange ray of sunlight found a hole and poked through like a spotlight, catching them against the dark background of the thicker, unlit clouds off in the distance.
Knowing what causes it doesn’t make it any less spectacular. (But all of those stupid wires!)
So I ran down the hill to the spot where I watch SpaceX launches out of Vandenberg, free from wires. Those couple of minutes cost me in terms of less color and sunlight, but the two wraiths were still lit.
Barely! Between the sunlight fading and the disturbance that had caused them dying out, they were vanishing, the visible moisture evaporating and being absorbed back into the air as equilibrium with the surrounding local atmosphere was reestablished.
And then it was gone. Almost – I caught just the slightest trace of color to the left of that palm tree crown. (And then I had to climb back up that hill to get home!)
(Map from 
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 