Lunistice and Summer Solistice

Last Thursday was the solstice, so I suggested that we hike up Spencer Butte and watch the not-quite-full moon rise before the sun set. In a different world, Mark and I would meet our gay pagan coven at the top for high ritual drumming and dancing; however in this world it was just us, lemon-honey-ginger tea, and macaroons. And my camera. And hippie-lite Eugene.

I may or may not have intoned intentionally trite couplets with poor meter while making vaguely mystical passes with my upraised hands and a spacey look on my face. Mark may or may not have said sarcastically, “that’s so hot.”

Spencer Butte is a Eugene City park. It’s not too much of a climb, but it is a good indicator of how in shape one is. We took the easy route up, mostly because I’ve sprained my wrist and I didn’t want to slip scrambling up the steeper side of the butte and re-injure myself.

The parking lot was full-ish, but we found a parking stall. The number of folks were evenly split between jogging attire, hiking attire, and hippie attire. As we hiked up the path, several scantily clad men wearing chunky jewelry descended; so I’m guessing we must have missed any Gay Pagan Men’s ritual at the butte’s peak.

We walked among the cedars on the east side of the butte in twilight, but the growing Earth-shadows had not yet become one night. In some corner of my mind, Suzanne Vega’s “Night Vision” played. There’s arched stone causeway which lends itself to one of us shouting “Smooching Bridge!” which is followed by smooching.

It was around 8:15 when we achieved the peak and daylight. The climb wasn’t too bad, but I will admit that the stairs at the end were challenging.

A group of loud folks coalesced at the end of the trail. Four vultures perched on a snag near by, and I took some photos of them. One by one they launched themselves into an updraft rising on the northwest side of the butte.

The old fire spotting station site freed up, and we managed to snag a seat on the flat triangle of concrete at the butte’s highest point. A stranger and his dog, Rico, joined us to get away from the jabbering crowd.

The haze to the east surprised us. Mark thought it was pollution stirred up by the 85F plus temperature. If you squinted, you could make out the Three Sisters. The sun was still about a handspan above Fern Ridge Reservoir on the western horizon.

The shadow of Spencer Butte stretched away from us, and I realized that it would be pointing in the general direction of moonrise. I had forgotten that the moon was at its lunistice, so it rose to the right of the butte’s shadow, about as far south as possible for it to rise. At first, you couldn’t see the moon as it rose just a little north of Mount June: its white dome blended in with the eastern haze. Slowly it inched upward until it broke away and hung over Mount June’s peak.

We turned around. The setting sun reflected off of Fern Ridge Reservoir, turning the western horizon into molten red gold.

We at the macaroons; they were a mélange of artificial flavors and aftertastes. We drank the tea, which was supposed to be summery and fiery; I liked it, Mark thought it was too sweet, but it did wash out the synthetic taste of the macaroons.

I took photos, pausing every now and then to appreciate what was going on directly. In a different time, I might have been drumming; in a different time, I might have chanted “Isis / Astarte / …” ; or walked a spiral lit with candles ignited with flame from the sun’s rays.

But just before the sun set, we started down the butte, descending into the twilight trees and not lingering at any potential smooching sites so as not to be caught in the parking lot in full night.

Our car joined the caravan of other cars heading back to Eugene. As Blanca Paloma sang AEAE (“…may they bury me on the moon / so that I might see you every day / every day but one…”) I spied a heart shape at the wooded side of the road: a three-point deer with its antlers arcing over its head.

Oregon's Partial Solar Eclipse

Today I managed to site today’s total solar eclipse.  Oregon was outside the path of totality, and Eugene only got about 23.5% sun coverage.  I thought this eclipse would be a little like last year’s, which was not very visible through the clouds, but the morning was relatively sunny before the eclipse, so I readied my colander, camera, and tripod with high (or at least higher) hopes.

I set up my portable work desk on the back deck and set things up.  I put a solar filter over the lens of my camera.  Back in the summer when I bought it, I had a notion that I’d fly east to be in the path of totality.  But by the time I got my act together in mid-January and sat down to actually purchase a ticket, they were prohibitively expensive.  The filter allows me to get a close-up of the sun’s disk, complete with sunspots. 

When the eclipse started, there was a light haze.  As the eclipse progressed over the next hour or so, the clouds became thicker.  This presented a bit of a challenge, as I had to keep adjusting the exposure time to compensate for changes in the sun’s luminosity.  When the cloud cover thickened,  I used a longer exposure time; when I used a longer exposure time, the camera was more likely to pick up the scattered light from the clouds.  Also, I’m also thinking the filter messed up the sharpness of focus—although I sometimes have difficulty dialing in sharpness of the moon’s features when I’ve extended the lens barrel out all the way.

Between shots I took a look at the sun through some eclipse glasses.  I also tried to get a good image of the eclipse through the holes of a colander; I think it would have worked better with more of the sun covered by the moon and less covered by the haze and clouds.  

This eclipse was fun, and I remember the eclipse of Friday, August 5, 2017.   That eclipse was a party with eggs, bacon, and mimosas.  This eclipse was juggled between a kind of early lunch, and various Day Jobbe tasks.   The previous eclipse was a family event; this year it was just me (Mark went into work), the dog, and the cats (Aoife did lunge into the camera tripod near the end to harass squirrels).   The effects of the eclipse were muted by the clouds, and we weren’t in the path of totality, so there were no amber alerts, shadow bands, or roosting birds.

Shortly after maximum coverage, the clouds thickened and hid most of the rest of the eclipse. I did get a few shots in at the end when the sky cleared some.  Of course, as soon as the eclipse was complete, the clouds cleared up and the sky was a deep, clear blue.

Still, it was better than last year’s annular eclipse.  

I wound up taking about 200 photos. It’s safe to say that not all 200 were stunning eclipse shots, but they do show the process.  I chose about sixteen that seemed the best (or at least the most interesting).

Conjunctions and a Rough Week

I should start out this post stating how much of a pain switching from standard time to daylight savings time has been this year.  Even though I've (mostly) gone to bed between 9 PM and 10 PM, I've pretty much been bedridden until 7 AM all week.  I've also been tired, cranky, depressed, and filled with ennui, which Mark is blaming on the time change. It could also be other things, like new moon, and the Very Grey Weather we've had since about the 8th.

Thursday morning, I'd actually managed to haul myself out of bed at 5:50 AM, shower, hard boil eggs, get dressed, and pack for a day of working remotely in Corvallis.  As I reached into the closet for the car keys at 6:30, I saw that the nail I usually hang them from had fallen out and the keys were nowhere in sight.  I felt around the To Go Bag on the closet floor and found the nail, but no keys.  I moved shoes and bags out of the closet.  I got a flashlight and looked around the closet.  

Mark got in on the search.  There was a discussion of alternate places the keys might be, even though they should be living on their nail.  I went through all of the jackets and coats I had worn in the last week.  I checked under a table.  Mark looked behind the boot bench. I went through my day pack. The tracking device on the key wasn't showing up on either of our phones, and there was speculation that battery was dead. Mark went through the battery basket. I looked under the couch. Mark checked under an entryway chair. I looked under the kitchen table. I emptied out my day pack. I took a flashlight, because the flashlight can help me to consciously look at things instead of glossing over them, and shone it under the TV, and by the computer monitor, and under the couch again, and into the closet, and under the front door's lamp.  I took off the couch cover and looked under the couch cushions. Mark looked under the computer desk. I took off the cushions under the Stickly Chair.  Mark swept under the rolling cabinet of wicker baskets.   I looked in the mail basket, and the winter glove basket, and the dog toy basket. I looked at the guest room desk. Mark went through my day pack.  I wandered around the living room, checking the mantle for the third time.  After about forty minutes of turning the house upside down and still not finding the key, I cancelled the trip to Corvallis and remote-worked from home.

That evening, the search continued.  I went into the guest room to tear apart the bed.  I picked up my day pack, and saw the car keys, sitting just below the zipper along the top of the main compartment.  Mercury isn't retrograde, but I'm blaming other supernatural forces for hiding the keys.  Mark suggested that I get a hammer and pound the nail back into the closet wall.  Which I did. A lot.

The skies have cleared up around the 13th, just in time for a conjunction of the Moon with Jupiter, and then a very close pass of the Moon by the Pleiades the next day.  "I thought you said they were going to be next to each other," Mark said Thursday night.  

"Well, I thought they were," I said.  "I guess Earthsky led me on.  They're still about as close as they're going to be on this pass."

The next night the Moon was right next to the Pleiades, and I was lucky enough to get some images of them during twilight, when the sky was still bright enough to even out the washing-out effect of an almost-quarter moon.  "I thought you said you could see the Moon next to the Pleiades," Mark said when the sky was much darker.

"Well," I said, "it is.  If you put your thumb over the Moon, you can see the Pleiades right over it."  Mark likes to be a contrarian when I say that the Moon is next to Jupiter, and Thursday night we had a loud conversation on the deck about how apparently close planets and stars are to each other, how I think it's neat when celestial objects are in conjunction (because it looks cool and doesn't happen every day), and how Mark thinks this is like religion.  I suppose on one level it is like religion, in that photographing the sky makes me feel like I'm participating in something larger than myself.

The best thing about the conjunction was that I realized that since we're close enough to the Spring Equinox for me to easily compute the sun's and moon's position on my Portable Stonehenge, I could mark the Pleiades position on the Holes, which, unsurprisingly, is near Aldebaran's position.  So I did.

Dreams and Skies

The weather has been a rollercoaster this last week.  Earlier, we spent an enjoyable weekend basking in the sunny 50F weather; this last few days we've had snow and this morning it's 22F outside.  I'm not sure what the hummingbirds think about all of this as ruddy sunlight creeps into our backyard and I imagine they're in a torpor right now.  

Weird and vaguely erotic dreams this morning led to a Reed Dream.  There was a sequence in a dorm or similar student housing.  I was changing clothes?  and noticed that water from the leaking roof had made bulging trails behind the ceiling's and wall's paint/plaster.  At one point during the dream, I commented on the oddness of being a practically sixty-year-old college student, but this did not result in the dream becoming lucid, and instead there was a muddled moment wondering how I was paying for my housing if I wasn't exactly enrolled in classes.  

There's a break in my recall.  I was in a large, dark, brick hall, it may have been a library.  At one point there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the room.  Along one wall were a series of arches, stairs, and balconies.  I had an iPad, which I had been using to write.  A renaissance ensemble was singing a Mysterium (I forget the name of the piece, except that it has a boy soprano part that sometimes is sung with helium).  They were singing it straight, and a woman in a blue period dress was singing the super-high part. She was having a theatrical interaction with one or two male choir members, and I'm not recalling the plot.  

During all of this I was going to RollerBlade.  A middle-aged collegiate woman advised me I should put away my iPad, as there had been a rash of iPad thefts.  As I was putting the iPad into my canvas bag, it slipped out, dropped about two feet onto the brick/concrete floor, and cracked.  At first I thought it was just the safety case around the iPad, but it was the glass front, which fractured and offered sharp edges to my fingers.  I put the iPad back into my bag and started to strap on my RollerBlades.  Now that I'm thinking about it, these were my original black-and-neon-yellow RollerBlades.  I had difficulty getting the bindings snapped in place, as they kept crossing and doing phyics defying things only possible in a dream muddle.  I never managed to get both RollerBlades on, and only imagined gliding around the Christmas tree to the sounds of a celestial choir.

On the sky front, we had a break in the clouds and I managed to snap some photos of the Moon and Jupiter (and its moons), as well a Venus

Holiday Break

The winter holiday is upon me!  I've taken a large swathe of time off with the vague notion that I will write and do various projects.  The first thing that I've discovered is that I'm going to be writing in the morning, I really need to wake up about two hours beforehand to get things like exercising, showering, eating, and generally waking up out of the way.  I also need to maintain a list of tasks to do besides writing.

Aoife has figured out what Postal, FedEx and UPS trucks sound like—apparently, it's pure evil.  Whenever one pulls up anywhere on our street, she goes into high alert, determined to kill whomever it is out there who is obviously a homicidal fiend in human form bent on deeds of depravity and trespass.  She's pulled the brass hood off of our door's mail slot twice since the holiday delivery season began, prompting Mark to replace it with a tasteful wood cover.  

Saturday was the last day of clear skies, and the grey overcast has returned.  I was able to take some photographs of Mars near Aldebaran and the Pleiades, and later the next morning the waning moon.  To my surprise, as I was crunching around on the frosty deck, one of the local hummingbirds came and visited the fountain.  Mark had been raking, and when he realized I was photographing them, he thoughtfully froze.  All I can say is that I am glad I'm not a little hummingbird sticking my bare bird feet into running water on a 30F morning. I don't know how the little things stay warm. 

The first weekend of vacation was taken up with holiday preparations.  We attended an in-person gathering of the cousins on the Burridge side of the family—out-of-state family stayed out of state, and various folks with children cancelled with child ailments; so while it was sad not being able to see everyone, the gathering was less boisterously overwhelming.   The Zoom Gathering was stereotypically Zoom, with a little bit of lag, odd camera angles, muting issues, thrown in to keep things hilarious.  We will have to host a outdoor gathering some time in the spring or summer when more folks can attend in person.

Sunday I went shopping at the local Holiday Market.  I enjoy shopping, much more so than Mark or The Child, and when I go alone, I'm able to do the reconnoiter-commando-raid style of shopping.   In addition to visiting with some of my vendor friends, I made several new best friends by wrapping myself up in a storybook glamour of the green and grey wool cloak, the Assassin's Creed hooded vest (with green shimmery paisley), a pewter Green Man pendent, extra rings, black KN95 mask, and my unbound hair.   Everyone seemed more interactive than I recall from previous years; I'm going to guess that the last two years of COVID has the extroverts overcompensating, myself included.  

The only downside of shopping at the Holiday Market is that I have to remind myself that I'm shopping for others and not myself.  And that I'm a solitary practitioner and not someone in a jewelry coven.  And I'm sure that I have enough ritual jewelry.   

Full Moon Conjunct Mars in Opposition

Happy Full Moon Before Yule in Conjunction with Opposition Mars.

We thought the sky would be too overcast and cloudy to see anything, but around 8 PM, there was a large enough hole in the clouds to take a few pictures.  

Of course I was fiddling around with the tripod and the camera focus to get too many photos before new clouds swarmed overhead, but I did manage to get some shots that weren't too artsy.

The moon was already a little to the east of Mars when we saw it, so I think we missed the actual occultation of Mars.  Still the two were about a fingers-width apart, and while the clouds may have blurred Mars a little, they also cut down on the Moon's glare.

Full Moon Dream

We join the dream in progress.  Mark and I were at a kind of conference or festival, a combination of OryCon, a LGBTQA retreat, and a pagan celebration.  Mark and I were in a small motel room with lots of moonlight  through the window, white sheets, and white curtains [hot sex scene redacted, but I will keep the joke "up periscope!"].

Early in the morning, a man in his late twenties or early thirties knocked on our door.  He was an amalgam of various people I know, clean-shaven, short curly hair, earnest.  He wore a sheet or a toga.  "Oh good," he said when we answered the door.  "I wanted to check in on you to see that you hadn't disappeared and let you know that last night Todd [editor's note, Todd is a random name] and I were walking around last night Todd saw you naked in the window, and I turned and I saw you, too.  You want to be careful."   The implication was that the conference center was in a rural area and we risked harassment at the least.

There was a break in the narrative.  I was sitting at a long formica-top table in a darkish conference center cafeteria.  A group of us might have been sitting in a booth.  There were clumps of people walking by, and my sense is that it was morning... but it might have been evening.  Three generic "townie" guys were at one end of the table (in waking life they remind me of the 19 year old "townie-hood-wanna-bes" who used to hang out in downtown Northfield, Minnesota, only in the dream they were super-generic, bland, middle-Americans), and six or so folks of diverse gender and orientation were at the other.  The two groups were at the same table, but sort of pretended the other wasn't there... or more accurately, the guys were pretending to be part of the gay/pagan conference, and everyone else was pretending to be taken in.  

The leader guy pulled out some hand written notes out of envelopes and started reading the letters.  I wondered how he'd gotten a hold of them.  The letters were things like coming-out stories and poems.  It wasn't exactly a doxxing, because he didn't know exactly who the authors were, but he was reading them to his friends and saying things like, "Can you believe this?" and other judgmental statements.  I worried that he might have something I'd written.  A discussion started between the lead guy and one of the diverse women, and it seemed like one of the generic guys was not as convinced of his moral superiority as he had been.

There was a break in the narrative.

I was in a brightly lit conference room, like a conference center ballroom divided down the middle by a movable partition.  I was waiting by a raised floor or stage, about fifteen feet on a side.  It was a square grid of white squares about two feet wide, either a dance floor or else some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.  Stairs on the grid led up to a second raised dais with a blocky throne.  I was wearing large black boots, more than motorcycle boots, but less than Glam Rock boots a group like Kiss might wear, and I held a large hammer (it wasn't Thor's Mjölnir, the shaft was like a sledgehammer's, but the head was a large rectangular hunk of metal).  A woman in a white dress, along with everyone else, was waiting for "Steve" (I've forgotten what his name was in the dream) to show up, so the presentation/conference could begin.

Finally, I said, "Well, I've got the boots and I've got the hammer, so I'll just start things until he get here."  I hopped onto the stage, went up the stair, and sat on the throne.  The presentation hadn't been going on long when some townies came in and glared at people.  I shrank back a bit on the throne hoping to remain inconspicuous.   

There's another break in the narrative.

It was dusk.  I was moving along a mostly straight path set along grassy and lightly wooded hills.  In waking life, the motion was similar to RollerBlading, but in the dream I was walking quickly.  The path was made of a dark red marble, with quartz veins and inclusions.  I supposed that either a heavy dew was falling or it had rained because the surface was shiny.  I held a long-handled rake, or squee-gee, or hockey stick in front of me, which I used to clear the surface of the path as I raced along.  I cleared off fallen miniature maple leaves that had fallen from some of the trees that the path sometimes passed through.

There were townies in the hill, but they had changed into fantasy raider armor of a vaguely Nordic type with thick helmets, with down-pointing bull horns on either side.   Sort of like the Knights of Ni, but I am only making that association many hours after waking.  They never got onto the path, but there was a sense that they might pull me off of it as I went speeding by.  I swooshed through miniature maples overgrowing the path, managed to avoid them, and raced before them.

Ahead in a canyon, there was a large group of mostly men having a dance contest.  It was night, but there was enough light from overhanging lights, and possibly a fire, to see bright red costumes of two men spinning around each other in a kind of tango or lindy.  In waking life I'm pretty sure this was inspired by a dance routine I'd seen earlier in the day.  More people came walking in procession along the path.

I was there to announce the end of the dance contest so that the contestants could be chosen and the next festivity could begin.  I rapped the butt of my rake in a four-four rhythm against the marble path, which made a loop around the dancing ground, and began to chant (iambic octameter?) in a language unknown to me: 

Oh-be Bárðarbunga nachtan
Oh-de Bárðarbunga nacht !

[editor's note, the chant is an approximation; the words Bárðarbunga and nachtan were not actually used, but something like that - there was certainly a ð in the mix.]  The crowd joined in and it became a call-and-response.  The energy of the chant grew until a hairy, burly man wearing nothing but a large, brown leather kilt rumbled a sustained and deep tone which ended it.

I woke around here; there was another scene where someone needed a special balloon inflation rig before the dance awards ceremony could start, but mostly I lay in bed and tried to fix the syllables of the chant in my mind.  

I'm trying to figure where this dream is coming from.  I was fatigued from a COVID booster and Cedar Creek Fire smoke, so the Full Moon ritual this time around was harping before moonrise in the backyard circle, scratching Cicero while an orange moon rose over the hills, and smooching Mark (once I got him outside).  This was followed up with various electronic word games with Mark, a small libation of tequila in honor of the moon, and the season one finale of Lucifer.  

The first part of the dream feels like typical privacy anxiety.  In the back of my mind I'm always wondering how well drawn bedroom blinds are and just how sound-proof everything is.  Mark at a convention, let alone a gay paganish one, would have been a sure sign I was dreaming if I had stopped think about it.  I think the convention is a lite version of "back at Reed" motif. 

The second part of the dream I suppose is a continuation of being out anxiety.  Mark dropped out of the dream.  I'm making some plans for traveling to a big city pride, and maybe this is connected somehow.  Though I am not sure where the generic straight rural townies are coming from.  They weren't "townies" per se, more just super-generic middle America dudes.  

The third part of the dream is puzzling.  I don't know what is going on with the boots and hammer.  The dream became more "Norse" as it progressed from this point.  The only thing I can think of is that earlier the previous day I had used a (smallish) hammer to drive some rebar into the ground in order to place gardening crooks for the sun and moon around the back yard ritual circle.  Oh, right... and recently I'd come across a 1902 painting of a "Young Germanic Warrior Looking at a Roman Helmet," by Osmar Schindler

The forth part of the dream is a fairly textbook otherworld transition material -- I'm surprised there wasn't a horse or a river involved, but the motion along the path (which did have a watery sheen) would count as crossing a boundary into an other realm.  Even if the waking world backyard circle of bricks transformed into the dream dancing ground, the hammer transforming into a rake/hockey stick still seems a little odd.  

The dream started in bright moonlight, transitioned to day time interior spaces, and returned to night time light by fires.  I don't know why by the end of the dream everything had become a kind of Heathen-fest.  I would have expected Greco-Roman or Egyptian or something more Arthurian.

Story Images

I've tricked out the Secret Writing Lair with a large leaded crystal, and now little rainbows are splashing themselves over the grape leaves and the foliate head.  This is a good thing, as it keeps my my mind off of the rising temperature.  At some point over the next week or two, the grapes will have produced bunches that are sweet enough to eat; we're hoping to get to them before resident night critters do.

Thursday night's full moon was more a meditation than an actual ritual.  I lit some incense, sat in the backyard circle, and listened to the evening sounds of frogs and crickets and the fountain.  Shortly after the moon rose, some neighbors about a block up the street began howling (later, Mark called it a full moon party).  It was kind of cute, but struck me at the time as slightly performative.  

I've continued to play around with MidJourney.  It's great for rendering abstract or general images, but I'm finding it difficult to direct the AI to produce images with a specific narrative that could be used as e-pub cover art.  Either the images become more uncanny as the AI adds extra heads, limbs, or body orifices or else it latches onto rendering an irrelevant object.  An attempt at a Victorian man at a large fireplace holding a chess knight resulted in a horse-headed gentleman with a hearth in his torso.  I think the trick is to not get too carried away by the AI's variations, which tend to become more bizarre and surreal as one goes along.

So, if I wanted an image that  Leonora Carrington might paint, the AI works great; aliens, I'm covered; specific fantasy story characters... well, if they were on fire or undead or extras from The Nightmare Before Christmas, I'd be good.  I did have some success pointing the AI to images to use as a starting point—Capricorn renderings looked more like goats and less like early experiments by Frankenstein.   Creating an image that will convince a reader to read the story, well... that's going to take some extra work.

Practically speaking, there might be a legal issue using AI generated images as cover art, because an AI (or the person using it) can't hold copyright for the image.  I suppose I'll have to look into the difference between using generated images and using public-domain images.

Writing wise... I reviewed some short stories and polished some bits that are more obviously in need of it after a period of not looking.  Another manuscript I looked at either needs to have the character's stakes heightened and the word-count shortened, or else I need to sit back and do some very loose outlining because the manuscript right now feels like an introductory chapter to a longer story.  I can see that my penchant for visual description needs to be reigned in, too,  

And I need to gear up submissions, too.

May 2022 Lunar Eclipse

Yesterday was an eclipse full moon.  The sky was partly cloudy, and there were some sprinkles, but it was clear enough that I set up the backyard circle for a solitary ritual (with patchouli incense!) and did a tarot card reading for myself.  This particular eclipse was supposed to be especially good for divination (and sex magic!).  

I laughed when the first card I pulled, representing my general state, was the Moon.  I grunted when the second card, representing obstacles, was The High Priestess reversed.   The following seven cards were mostly swords and pentacles, and I'm still trying to figure out what they mean as a whole -- but it's along the lines of challenge your unconscious assumptions to make sure they jive with reality and then actually do something.  I think--this reading was one of the more disjointed ones.  I probably should have done a Celtic Cross spread instead of the past-present-future spread that I used, or reframed my question as a yes-or-no question instead of a what-should-I question.

After the ritual, I grabbed my camera and went up the hill to see the eclipse.  There was a bank of clouds on the horizon, so the actual 8:29 moonrise was obscured.  The eclipse totality was to begin shortly.  

When I got to the reservoir, there were about a hundred people there.  I walked through crowds of milling people, cyclists, and shrieking children to the eastern end of the reservoir, to where folks with tripods, telescopes and cameras were.  I thought maybe I'd see some astronomy friends, J&C O, but they weren't there.  Neither was the moon.  

The sky was still light, and it seemed as if the eastern clouds and haze became more substantial.  After a while, folks perceived an orange glow in the grey overcast.   A hush fell on the crowd as people adjusted telescopes or peered through the vapors between trees.  Then someone started playing an electric guitar battle or something and the clouds thickened.  

Shortly after full totality, the clouds drew away from the moon enough to make it visible.  Everyone appreciated the orange color.  And then a limb of cloud would obscure the moon again.  Focusing the camera was difficult; the moon wouldn't be out long enough to confirm the focus, and between the clouds and dimness, the best strategy was to focus on a star (once it was dark enough for them to be visible) and then swing the camera back at the moon — assuming it was visible enough to find.  

I think I got about five passable photos of the moon out of about eighty.  

April Moon Near Taurus

The skies are clouding up again after a few days of relative clear.  Earlier this afternoon, I saw a half moon, but now the evening overcast has hidden it from view.  Possibly when the night becomes darker I'll be able to guess where the moon is by the glow of the clouds.  

The other night I managed to photograph the crescent moon as it sailed between the Pleiades and Aldebaran.   I looked at some similar photos from last year; I think those photos are a little better because I used a higher ISO, I was therefore able to take shorter exposures which resulted in less star streaking.  

I am hoping that in a month's time the skies will be clear enough to catch a slender crescent near Taurus.  The timing will be tricky because the whole spectacle will be closer to the setting sun, so while the Moon should be visible, it might not be so easy to see the Pleiades.  

COVID-19 restrictions are easing up.  It's taking some getting used to.  I'm so used to wearing a mask when I go into work that not wearing one, and being in an inside open space with people who also aren't wearing makes feels weird.  I will have to keep a more consistent eye on the local COVID case count to see if a spike starts up.  

Day of Producing Art

It's been a while since I photographed the planets.  Saturday, we had a break in the weather:  the morning sky was clear and cold, which meant that Venus, the Moon and Mars were visible in the pre-dawn sky.  Venus is approaching its greatest brilliance, in a few days it should be visible during the day.  The Moon was three days before being new, and rose something like 5 AM.   Mars was dim compared to the Moon and Venus.

All three objects were fairly low in the sky, which necessitated crossing the street with camera and tripod. After contending with some awkwardly placed power lines, I managed to frame the sky over the eaves of neighbors' houses.  It would have been nice to have a tree's silhouette in the photo, but the rooflines looked like mountains or possibly pyramids.  

After a quick jaunt to the store for tea, I set up the camera and tripod in the backyard against the arbor vita trees, focused on the fountain, and waited for the hummingbirds to appear.  Of course, the first hummingbird to appear came while I was futzing with the tripod and I only managed a blurry photo of it flying off.  I finished set-up.  I felt a little like some early twentieth century British Naturalist, as I had set up a small end table, chair and cushion, and had wrapped myself in faux leopard skin fleecy blanket.  

As I was sipping my rapidly cooling tea, a fierce humming signaled the sudden arrival of a bright red hummingbird.  It peered at me down its long and pointy beak, and, as I Tweeted later, I was pretty sure it was challenging me to a duel over ownership of the fountain ("Hello.  I am a hummingbird.  This is my fountain.  Prepare to die.")  

The light meter on the camera helped me to gauge the sun's progress, as I would have to adjust the shutter speed to compensate for the increase in light.   When the hummingbirds came to the fountain I was mostly ready.  I took many photos, fiddled with fine-tuning the camera's focus, and managed a number of good shots and one excellent one (the first one).  

By the time my tea had defrosted the glass top of the end table, it was too cold to drink.  

I spent the rest of the morning processing photos, and then it was time to go to my folks for a socially distanced celebration of my Dad's birthday.  We brought gluten-free cupcakes as a alternative to a socially closer birthday cake with candles.  Mark and I (okay, mostly Mark) had painted a sign for his garage, which he's converted into a combination wood shop, gym, and indoor dog play area.  It looked a little like a medieval manuscript, with the H in his name outlined and a medieval dog at the bottom.  I'm pretty sure he liked it, or at least appreciated it.  His ginormous German Shepherd and Aoife played together; we played "Apples to Apples."  

Then it was time to run home and feed the cats.  

The evening wound up with the finishing touches on a the latest geometric Math Art.  

If Saturday was the Day of Producing Art, Sunday was the day of Relative Sloth.  

Solitary Wolf Moon Ritual

Monday night was clear enough for me to hold a solitary Full Moon Ritual.  I lit a patchouli incense stick, turned off the lights in the house, and slipped outside.  The moon was in the northeast, but high enough and bright enough that the cherry tree cast shadows onto the back yard circle.  The darkness and overgrown grass made it difficult to see all of the bricks in the circle, but I managed to do conduct a simple 101 ritual.  

I met Mark on a Full Moon; we got married on a Full Moon.  I've harped at lunar eclipses; I've swam naked, the silver light of a desert moon casting its wavy net through the water -- but somehow I went back to the Full Moons of Three Hundred and Sixy-Nine Moons ago and imagined I heard the chanting and laughter of ritual circles of the Carleton College Druids, and fancied I felt the rush of many bodies dancing, hands linked, in a deosil ring.  

Then the moment passed, and it was only me, the circle, and rising grey strands of incense weaving between cherry branches and the Moon.  

Dog Park Moon

Late December and early January nights were supposed to be good for watching the waxing crescent moon pass by Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Since it's just after the Winter Solstice, the evenings and mornings have been cloudy and overcast, so I hadn't really seen much of the moon (or the planets, for that matter) for about a week and a half.

When we took Aoife to the dog park a few evenings ago, just before sunset, the sky cleared up enough to show a waxing half moon.  I surprised myself by managing to take an in-focus picture of the moon bracketed by tree branches.  

I think Mark thought I was particularly daring to bring the camera into the Very Muddy Dog Park (we'd had two inches of rain a few days earlier, on top of the previous week's eight inches of snow).   I was more worried that Somebody Else's Dog might jump on me with their muddy paws than I was of slipping or dropping the camera into a puddle.   I managed to get a few photos of Aoife, but the majority of them were blurry action shots of her chasing things.  

The fog, which had rolled back around noon, reasserted its dominion over the landscape as the sun set.   By the time we got home, the sky was a dark grey blanket, unspangled by stars, and the night was moonless.