One word

Orionids

That doesn’t really cut it though, does it? Even if you know what the Orionids are, I didn’t say when they’d be occurring, and if you did know, you probably wouldn’t need me to tell you when, or even that they are occurring. I was just trying to, you know, counteract my tendency to write too damn much when only a few words would do, or go read more

Too cool, part 40: Red sprites in incredible detail


Astronomy Picture of the Day today featured a confusing and abstract image, because it’s something probably never seen in this detail before: a collection of red sprites above an active thunderstorm.

Here’s the deal. Occasionally, waaayyyy above the tops of the clouds on some thunderstorms, there is an additional discharge – actually, two different kinds, the other being read more

Three moons


Just posting three photos from a recent trip (which I’ll cover in detail a little later on.) I thought the comparison was worth seeing. They are from August 8th, 10th, and 14th.


These are fairly good illustrations of why shooting a moon that is less than full can look a lot more dynamic. You get great shadows and textures from a slightly oblique sun angle, and the results just seem more real.

The read more

Storytime 34


I’m not even going to tell you what you’re looking at here I’m simply going to let you puzzle it out on your own, given the visual clues within. Then you can tell me the story behind it.

Oh, all right – since you’ve read all this way, which certainly puts you ahead of most webnauts anymore, I suppose I can fill you in. Except, not entirely, because I no longer remember read more

Stormy season

Just a quick note, but there’s another meteor shower peaking soon, this time the Perseids, supposed to reach maximum on the nights of the 12th and 13th. I tell you this mostly to point out that, yet again, the moon is going to be too bright to make much of them, being damn near full those nights. I’m going to have to sit down and calculate how often either a) the moon has been too bright, read more

Oh, give it a shot

It’s been a while since I’ve made the attempt myself, but the moon conditions at least are almost ideal now. Over the next few nights we’ll be near-peak for two different meteor showers: the Delta Aquarids and the Alpha Capricornids. All too often, the moon is too bright for good viewing, throwing excessive light across the sky (especially in humid climes like read more

Little to add

If you’ve been paying close attention to the obscure sections of the media, you might already know that today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. You know, Earth’s moon, Luna, that big grey thing in the sky, just to clarify. And I’m vaguely curious to know how much attention this gets in other countries I imagine it’s at least a tad less read more

Storytime 27


I’m running a little behind today, since I normally have the storytime post up by now, but I wasn’t feeling very well last night and had several other things to tackle. But it’s not like I’m being audited or anything. I don’t think.

The main image above comes from just barely over nine years ago, taken July 3rd 2010 out over Jordan lake. I’d had some decent success read more

Storytime 24


I had thought I was posting the most recent Storytime post so far, but I’d forgotten about this one. However, this is still pretty current, since most of the images are only a couple of days old.

I mean, except the one above. That’s a month old today, taken May 14th, in the same photo session as the read more

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