Perhaps having read my previous post where I dumped on February for being so dismal and rainy, it responded by producing a quite nice day today, as in, no jacket required, so take, take me home. The handful of leftover pics I had slotted to throw up here are now superseded by the ones I actually got today, and there’s just a few, so settle in.
We need to start with, the weeping willow (Salix
On Monday, we had clear enough skies for me to go out and check on the condition of the sun, or more specifically, the sunspots thereon. I could not actually make any out in the viewfinder, nor on the monitor when I had unloaded the card.
I considered myself a victim of bad timing, since we’ve been having so much activity in this form for the past couple of years, and the reason
It’s plastic, with cheap gold-ish plating that’s already wearing off, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
This means I responded to the forecasts that there might be a decent aurora borealis display early this morning, and went out to try my hand. The temperature was near freezing and the LCD display wasn’t showing a lot, so I wrapped it up after 45 minutes at the most.
… that one of these days I’ll break my streak of bad luck in attempting to capture meteors. That’s how odds work, right?
Anyway, the Geminids meteor shower is peaking over the next few nights, specifically Saturday at about 10 PM EST (or 0300 UTC Sunday morning,) while the moon will be dark, so if you have clear skies, go for it and show me up. According to
We didn’t have enough photos for November (for an arbitrary definition of ‘enough,’) so here are a few more – I already had most of them lined up in the folder for eventual use, but then settled on this topic and added a couple – even though they’re all only variants of the same image.
We start with a frame that I fired off while pursuing the Leonids and aurora
So, [you ask because you’re following everything I post with due excitement] how did Monday morning’s pursuit of the Leonids and aurora borealis go? And I, being the suspicious type that tries to detect subtle impish questions that you already know the answer to, pause just long enough to convey this suspicion before plowing ahead anyway.
In short, no better than any other time I’ve
This is just to let you know that not only is the Leonids meteor shower expected to peak tonight after midnight, but there’s a chance that the aurora borealis will make another appearance, and with a dark moon (actually, it doesn’t matter how bright it is, because it’s riding too close to the sun right now and thus wont be seen most of the night,) the conditions
Another two part one this week – we’ll start off slow.
While I had been seeing some news alerts that the aurora borealis might be visible in several northern states, I paid little heed to them since North Carolina, despite its name, is far from being considered a ‘northern’ state. Then The Girlfriend’s Sprog told me that we might actually be seeing a display here, and
This is just to give you adequate notice that the Leonids meteor shower is expected to peak the evening/morning of the 16th/17th, just a few nights away. While it is not forecast to be a significant one this time around, it has a tendency to be a decent display, so go for it.
Just to let you know, pictured is not Leo, but Orion, and not a meteor, but a plane of course. I have no worthwhile pics of
Or, don’t – I’m about to show you why not.
So, once again the media is hyping a ‘supermoon’ for the full moon going on right now, which means a full moon very near the moon’s closest approach to the earth, or perigee. “The biggest and brightest moon for all of 2025!” or even longer periods, and such articles pop up all the time. We have a very clear
