A splash of evening color


Just a quick pair of pics, taken less than an hour ago. There will be another post coming, hopefully before the day is out, that has more of those words that you all love so much, but for now, we have color.

And a moon. And if you look closely, Venus. I think it’s Venus.


Yeah, just checked through Stellarium – it’s Venus. You might see it better later on, depends.

Something from yesterday


The images in this post are going to reflect more of my casual shooting stance last night, and I apologize. I went out solely to see if I could capture something in the few minutes that it might be visible, and I did, but didn’t have my heart set on astrophotography and it shows.

Above, a crescent moon was showing notable earthshine on the ‘shadowed’ portion while I was out, so read more

Moon Face Monday


Hey hey it’s Old Man Al D here with a new topic, “Moon Face Monday!” Today we have a first quarter moon giving way to gibbous phase, taken just hours ago! “Gibbous” comes from the Latin word gibbus, meaning ‘humpbacked,’ which I suppose could be said to apply to such a phase, if you ignore the obvious aspect of bierbeibei, read more

Brand spanking

It’s about 2:30 AM as I type this – again, my sleep ‘schedule’ is totally wacked and yet, completely typical for me. And knowing that the posting date will show and that some astute reader may refer to this for confirmation of conditions, I feel somehow obligated to refer to events as ‘yesterday’ even though they were a few hours back and all that. But yeah.

Saturday read more

On this date 1

This year we have a new regular post: ‘On this date,’ which I’d considered calling, ‘On this date in history,’ but I decided to shorten the title a little. The premise is, each week I will feature a photo taken on the same date in some past year. I could have made it, for instance, ‘On this date 2010’ but I’m quite sure I would have read more

Take that, younger Al!

I was thinking that the crescent moon was going to be bigger than it actually was this morning, so I checked with Stellarium and my sunrise/moonrise app to see when it would appear, knowing that it would be early morning close to sunrise and the sky should be perfectly clear. “Perfectly” is naturally imperfect, by nature – while we may not see distinct and visible clouds, there read more

It’s all gone dark

The sky did indeed clear enough to do some detailed moon shots, but alas, I was a hair too late.

For those just joining us and not having read enough posts on this blog, get the fuck out no one wants your kind around here I have, for no reason that anyone should examine closely, had the goal of just catching sunrise on the central peak of Tycho, probably the best known crater on the moon. read more

Yeah, nah

Earlier this evening but on a previous day, I was doing a bit of blog maintenance and checked the post count so far this year: 166 (not counting this one of course.) That not only beats out last year’s count already, by four posts, but places this year fourth out of eleven years so far, with six weeks to go. Am I gonna set a new record? Not likely, because that’s held read more

From the lair of the Lion came the Fire

Boy, a couple of capital letters makes everything dramatic, doesn’t it? But all I’m referring to is the Leonids meteor shower, which should be peaking tomorrow night or thereabouts.

I have reminders set up on my calendar for about a week in advance, because you can start seeing activity well before a peak, and the Leonids has, at times, been a pretty damn good shower. And I’ve had read more

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