The Fading Light of Day

I am better but still a bit under the weather with my cold.  I looked out the window of the back room and saw this scene.  I grabbed my camera and thought I could shoot from indoors, and then thought better of it, so I bundled up and went outside to take this photograph.  I wish I could show it to you in a really large size so you could see all the delicate branches, sharp against the sky.  It is so incredibly beautiful, as the light of day fades.

And forgive me for repeating myself by showing you the Moon again, but it was crystal clear tonight so I could shoot the moon in amongst the trees without clouds in the way.  Too bad it was not this clear when I was shooting the Moon with Venus yesterday.  There is some feeling I can't quite put my finger on about the moon at dusk in amongst all the other trees.  Anybody care to guess at the feeling I am getting from this?

 

The Moon and Venus Together

The Moon and Venus were unusually close this evening shortly after sunset which is always a joy to see. They have been closer at times, but tonight they were 3 degrees from each other.  I thought they looked closer in this wider view.  I'm not sure which photograph expressed this best, so as an experiment, I cropped the photo above much tighter in hopes they might seem closer, and the image is below.  In which image do they seem closer?

The two were relatively low on the horizon, and we are surrounded by trees here, so I tried to photograph them in the trees.  The problem is that they are so bright, that if I expose for the Moon, you won't even see the tree branches.  So I overexposed the moon and it is larger and blurry, but you can see all the branches around the two in the photograph below.

I moved over into the far side of the side yard and was able to get both clear of the trees, but there were clouds so both the Moon and Venus have halos around them.  And they are overexposed so that we can see the details in the branches.  So even though the Moon and Venus are not sharp, I think that the photograph still has some value.

 

The Electric Hedge

I was on the phone this afternoon with my friend Sam in Florida.  Just as we sere finishing up, I looked out one of the west windows in the back room.  I saw some bright yellow sparkling lights and I was puzzled.  I thought the sun had already set.  When I stood up, I could see that the sun was just above the horizon, just enough for the last light to illuminate some of the leaves on the hedge!  I jumped up, knowing that the sun moves so quiclky, and grabbed my camera from the dining room and ran out the door.  I was just in time to get the last light on the leaves.  Lovely and subtle, isnt it?

 

Catching Up

I had coffee with Jessica today at a Starbucks.  She and her husband had driven up from Florida where they now live to visit both their families for Christmas.  I have written about her before but the short story is that she came to our astronomy club at age 14 when she was in High School and said she wanted to build a telescope!  She went on to college here on Long Island, at Stony Brook University where she got a Bachelors and a Masters, and then worked for a few years at a high tech science center.  Then off to the University of Arizona for her PhD in Astrophysics, which she completed recently, and which I celebrated here on the blog.  She is now doing her Post Doc work at a university in Florida.  So we had a lot to talk about and probably spent three hours catching up!  She is holding her note book where she keeps all kinds of notes, and when I asked her a question about some NASA sounding rocket that she hopes to use to lift a telescope up above the atmosphere to study a particular type of star, she went to her notebook for her answer!  I was thinking we had known each other for about 16 years, and that somehow didn't seem like that long, until she said: "Ken, I have known you for half my life!"  Wow!  What a wonderful afternoon catching up!