Trying to slam this story out before the date changes – wish me luck!
So, in checking out Stellarium earlier (a couple of times, actually,) I noticed that there were a few satellite passes that would appear to cross the still-slightly-crescent moon, one of which would trace right across the crescent itself from side to side, as long as I was in a particular location. Since this wasn’t
Well, okay, you’ll probably have to be the judge of that…
A few days back, in the previous post, I mentioned that the rising moon the next day would be this itsy-bitsy little crescent, a mere 0.6% illuminated, preceding the sunrise by a little over 20 minutes. I also mentioned that the weather here wasn’t amenable to pursuing it.
In the interim (within a day, really,) the moon became
Yes, it’s the autumnal equinox, that particular day when half of the moon is illuminated by the sun. Let’s have a look, shall we?
What, you were expecting to see a half-sphere, first quarter moon? I said half of it was illuminated, but that doesn’t mean we’re in a position to see it from Earth. I mean, half of the moon is illuminated when it’s
Buggato has, several times, avowed that he was going to be up, having fun shooting sunrise, while I had to go into work, but somehow I never see any sunrise pics on his blog. Odd, that. But this morning, up far earlier than intended, I had my chance. Only thing is, the sky is perfectly clear and thus rotten conditions for sunrise, which needs humidity and for preference scattered high-level clouds
So, Monday night I went down to the lake to try again on those focus and tracking tests. The light was again ideal, only this time, it remained that way until the sun disappeared behind the trees. Unfortunately, I saw even fewer birds than before. I may be partially to blame here, since we’re now past nesting season and the adults have much less to do with no babies to feed.
We’re back in 2004, in Florida, with the borrowed digital camera. I was maintaining a small saltwater aquarium in the simplest way possible, which was to get fresh water for it twice a week and run an aerator within, and that was about it. The residents cycled through, being returned to the Indian River Lagoon and being replaced by whatever I happened to find, with a few hardy
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.
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
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
One of my monthly routines regarding the blog is to keep track of the number of posts and the photos used, partially in case of server failure (which has happened before,) and partially out of curiosity. There is this faint background goal of posting more than I did for the previous year, but I don’t pursue that very tightly as I’ve said before, I’d