Pumpkin moon

The lunar eclipse last Friday was not visible from here on Vancouver Island, but we got treated to a full orange moon and its pathway over the water last night.

10:20 PM. The path extends from the weeds (barely visible) along the shore to the horizon.

They call it a "blood moon", but from here, it's orange. Orange blood? Didn't sound right. I looked up other common names for this moon.

The Full Moon for the month of July is called Buck Moon to signify the new antlers that emerge on deer buck's foreheads around this time. This Full Moon is also known as Thunder Moon, Wort Moon, and Hay Moon from Old English/Anglo-Saxon. (Timeanddate.com)

That orange is a pumpkin-y colour; it's too early for pumpkins, but I'm naming it a pumpkin moon, anyway.

Seen on the way home from a party: luckily my passenger didn't mind waiting while I propped the camera on the back of the car and tried to focus.

Trapped

... in a web of  branches.

Afternoon moon

Pointing at the moon

4:43 PM, Friday, at Oyster Bay

Two days before the full "Wolf Moon".

A Skywatch post.

Reaching for the moon

In the summer, I love evergreens, so cooling, so light-absorbent. In wintertime, I am enthralled by the empty branches of deciduous trees, sometimes festooned by lichens, sometimes painted with green mosses, always individual, always graphic against the sky.

This one wears green and yellowish moss.

The moon is almost within reach.

And in early spring, I marvel at the sight of the shiny new, neon-green leaves. It won't be long now; buds are bursting out all over.

Another Skywatch post.

More or less

Winter solstice. Almost.

Sunrise, such as it was on a grey, rainy day this morning, was at 8:17 AM. And we will have 8 hours, 4 minutes, 6 seconds of daylight; 5 seconds less than yesterday. It's not until the 23rd that the day will be longer than today, by 7 seconds.

December Solstice (Winter Solstice) is on Monday, December 21, 2015 at 8:49 PM in Campbell River. This day is 8 hours, 18 minutes shorter than on June Solstice. In most locations north of Equator, the shortest day of the year is around this date. (timeanddate.com)

Tickling the moon. Laurie's photo, Oyster Bay, 2009

We tend to think in absolutes. Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year. In the far north, they have 6 months of daylight. Sunrise is at a precise time. The sun is overhead at noon. The moon is 384,400 km. away. It's 3 degrees above freezing today. High tide is at 12:42, at 14.7 ft.

And that's all wrong. It all depends on where you are, when you took the measurement, how you counted.

Temperatures vary from one spot to the next, a few feet away. Noon is an approximation, averaged over an entire time zone. Dawn sneaks up on us through the different stages of twilight, over a period of a couple of hours.

The moon today is 368,726 km. away from Campbell River, where I am. Tomorrow it will be farther away. Noon, when the sun is as high overhead as it's going to get, is at 12:19 PM. And the Solstice is at 8:49 tonight, long after sunset.

And so on.

It's not only living things that are fuzzy. Everything is.

Hydroids on eelgrass, anemones, and floating critters.

Yes, that's the moon

(Update and correction: No, that's the sun. Wrong time of day for the moon, wrong shape, too.*)

BC is on fire again. CBC News reports that there are more than 180 wildfires active in the province today, and more are expected every day until it rains. The one small fire that started in Vancouver is out, but we are getting smoke from other nearby fires, some quite large. Our skies are grey, an orangey, greeny, sickly grey, not the cool blue-grey of a rainy day. The air stings the back of my throat; a day ago, I stayed inside with everything shut tight, to keep the smoke at bay. Yesterday, I went to IKEA, where it was cool and the air is filtered.

On the way home, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the moon shining through that grey sky. I stopped the car and took a couple of photos.

Yes, that's the moon. (No. The sun.)

I took a photo with the tops of the trees, just to show it wasn't a kid's balloon.

I'm inside again, with everything shut tight. I can still smell the smoke.

*Thanks, Jen.

Facebook in the sky

"Tree has poked you. Poke back?"

Laurie delights in taking these. His trees love the moon, it seems.

Oyster Bay, Vancouver Island, 2009.

Midafternoon moon

The moon stoops low over Crescent Beach:

Taken just before 3 in the afternoon.

A Skywatch post.

Supermoonstruck

moon·struck (mo̵̅o̅n′struk′)
adjective affected mentally in some way, supposedly by the influence of the moon; specif.,

1. crazed; lunatic; insane
2. romantically dreamy
3. dazed or distracted

Definition from Dictionary.com

We've been out moon-chasing. I think it affected both us and the cameras. Our photos of the night's "supermoon" are a little ... unusual.

We went, first, across the street to the vacant lot, where we would have a more or less clear view as the moon rose. However, we had not realized how many lights even this empty area could offer for competition; street lights on three sides of the lot, house lights behind and to the side, headlights of cars on the street behind us. There was a bit of fog, which diffused all the lights, enlarging them and blurring the view.

We moved back home to the third floor balcony. By then, the moon was above the fence and the gap in our evergreens, and we could see the man in the moon clearly. Our cameras couldn't; the moon was too bright.

But, wait! I did get a man in the moon!

Not the same guy that usually shows up. Maybe he's subbing.

(In reality, the markings are the tips of an evergreen branch in the foreground. But then, the old MitM is supposedly just shadows of rocks and valleys on the moon face. For tonight, I'm going to believe in the subbing hypothesis. Tomorrow is soon enough for sanity.)

That was a photo from my little Sony. All my moon shots had a green and sometimes yellowish halo. Laurie's Nikon registered a red/pink halo:

Close and distant evergreens, and a haloed moon.

And this one, with a tree bisecting the moon, reminds me mostly of a bacterium, in the process of dividing. Strep, maybe. I like the way the moon's light wraps itself around the trunk, as if it were growing there.

We can't really figure out how Laurie got this one.

As it came from the camera, only resized.

I think the wide stripe is the moon. But down at the bottom are two wheels and a bumper of a car on the road. So something must have distracted Laurie while the camera was still working on the photo. (Those little demons in the box are slow, sometimes.) So I think he swooped around, picking up the street lights, something that blinked (turn signal?) and traffic. And all that orange background lighting.

And there's a heart for Clytie, too!

Another Skywatch post.

Half a dozen moons

Another rainy day. So I went on with my sorting and rearranging old photos. (I managed to delete over 1000 of them; how's that for self-discipline?)

I ended up the evening cleaning out the collection of skies, and found a few that I don't think I've posted before. Moon shots. Perfect for a Skywatch post!

Early-bird moon, with dying sunlight. Crescent Beach, November 2007.

Dawn moon. From our balcony, November 2008.

Moon and wires. Safeway parking lot, Surrey, June 2008.

The moon and Venus, over Strathcona. January 27, 2009. I kept going out all evening, taking more pictures until they disappeared.

Venus again, half an hour later.

Branches, Tsawwassen. March of 2009.

Three days later, March of 2009, from the balcony. With snow and orangey outdoor lighting.

Duck!

Sometimes the moon looks as if it were about to fall on our heads.


Laurie got this blurry shot of one of those times. The hint of pink is from the sun, not quite finished setting at the other end of the sky.

.

Hit or myth weather forecasting

Signs overhead, Thursday evening:

Snowflakes against a blue, blue sky. A warning, or a promise?

Full moon. Rumoured to cause insanity.

Red sky (well, pink) at night; sailor's delight.

So, what did we get?

Friday; rain, wet snow, sleet, wind, more rain. My poor chickadees bathed in the birdbath full of slush.

Saturday; sunshine in the morning, and fine, dry snow starting after supper. It's still snowing, tiny, barely-there flakes that drift idly down, but do not melt when they land.

Midnight photos: a dusting of snow on the hydrangeas.

Iron birds faithfully guarding the tiny moss planter.

Conclusion: the sailor was insane.
.

This begs for a button eye and a candy mouth

Just after sunset, a few hours ago, Laurie saw this:

One of the globe lights in our parking lot, with the moon behind it.

I think I want to Photoshop it.
.

Trapped!

The moon over a parking lot, tonight:


.

Spaced

No photo today**; instead, I'll try to paint a picture with halting words.

Today we went across the river to shop in New Westminster. It was a clear, sunny day; even though everything froze hard overnight, by noon the ice had melted wherever the sun reached.

We were done shopping by 4:30 and headed home. The setting sun was mostly straight ahead, almost at road level. The sky, even through sunglasses, was a light orange, the sun a blinding orange-yellow circle, dimmed by haze just enough to let us see its shape. And big; as big as the harvest moon of last November.

I tried my best not to look directly at the sun, especially because I was driving. But it kept leaping out at us as we crested a small rise or as the road turned under us. Luckily, it was partially screened by trees, leafless but still providing some cover. Maybe that was why it looked so huge; the trees barely covered half its diameter.

The road home crosses three bridges. On the second one, the sun was to our right, haloing the trees of the bog*, touching up the bridge railings with orange highlighter, ricocheting off the river, off windows and tin roofs. I turned away, to the left, to rest my eyes.

And there was the moon. A full moon, fully as big, today, as the sun, but gleaming white, whiter even than the snowy mountains below.

Round white moon, round orange sun, and us in the centre in our little white car on the rounded slope of the bridge.

Beautiful!

At moments like these, I get an inkling -- a sensation, an intuition, maybe -- of our planet as part of a much larger world. Bodies, large and small, whirling in a rhythmic space dance, and ourselves as mere dots crawling on the surface of this blue-green ball. Insignificant, even in our cities, freckles on the skin of the world. Yet important, because we are part of that larger whole. And because what we do can affect the dance, even if only by changing the dress of our particular performer.

And, if the presence of an observer has an effect on reality, as some say, we are that observer.

I explain that very badly. I don't know if we have words to do justice to the feeling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*(Either Lulu Island Bog, or Burns Bog, I'm not sure which. Depends on the exact angle.)

**Changed my mind: here's a moon shot. Crescent Beach, last month.