At night

I was finished making supper and the buzzer had buzzed, so I was in a hurry to get something of the conjunction I saw out the window as I went past it. It was Jupiter and Venus, being swallowed by clouds and going down behind the neighbour's house. So I grabbed this shot which I am pretty pleased with. My wife held the curtains back for me. It is through three layers of window glass, but not bad. If you zoom in, you can see three moons of Jove: Callisto, Ganymede and Io. And you can imagine, if you will, that you see the ovate phase of Venus. Maybe. Maybe not. And then we ate supper. The clouds moved in and the planets slipped further down, and they were gone.

A couple of nights ago, sitting reading in a favourite chair, I spied myself and my surroundings reflected in the window.

About this time last night, down the street at the mail boxes. Then overnight we had about fifteen cm of snow that turned to rain. March weather.

Just a sliver of itself, Day Two of the new moon, a few minutes after the sun had set.

OK, without going into questions of congruency with the modern tax year, and the traditional seasons, nor with the equinox and the modern Persian Nowruz, let me say that for centuries the British celebrated New Year's Eve tonight, and the New Year tomorrow, March 25th. Fact is, we keep the tree up and lit on nights like this until it goes blasty, usually in May month. And, we will tell you, the birds like it. In any case, this is the view right now out our kitchen door, in the wintry blasts of the hungry month. Happy New Year, all.

Three days before the Full Moon, the moon looks pretty full. This was outside our kitchen door a few minutes ago.

The moon rises out of the sea a half hour or so before we see it over the hill that hides the sea from our view. But when it did rise this evening over the hill, Shea Heights, this is what we saw, just a few minutes ago.

Most summers we get a few days of what people sometimes call a Boston Smog -- hazy hot weather that is partly composed of industrial pollution from the neighbouring country to our South. Sometimes we get smoky haze from big forest fires. For the past couple of weeks we've been getting that from Canada, our neighbour to the West. (Oh, yes: I forget sometimes -- we're part of that country!) And the sun and the moon have been varying shades of orange and red. This is what I see out the window right now, an hour after sunset.

This pretty little thing showed herself to us through our deck door and then busied herself stalking voles. Or so I imagine since she went to where I've been seeing voles this week. It was duckish and I imagine too that the crepuscular light was an advantage to her. She was sitting at the edge of our driveway when she realised I was looking at her through the screened window upstairs. And she looked up. The combination of dusk and the screen makes for some visual artefacts. We don't know her, but I expect she belongs to one of our near neighbours. She is not the top predator in the neighbourhood — we have seen foxes in recent weeks, and neighbours have seen coyotes.

A newish Moon, four days old, setting not too long after sunset over our street.

This was the view a few minutes ago, looking south from our deck. From the cover of the little icebox I used in lieu of a tripod, perched on the deck rail. The apple and dogberry trees were lit by stray light from the kitchen. But the Milky Way didn't need any of our light to show off. My camera, the decade-old X100, only does thirty-second exposure easily, so after fifteen seconds I covered the lens. Thus the exif says 30 seconds while it was only fifteen.

Okay okay I didn't focus on the moon. I know. But this is what's up above our garden this evening.

I was testing my new camera's ability to take pictures of stars when I saw a more interesting sight next door. (The little bright light in the upper right is a tiny fragment of the Moon, behind heavily leafed trees.)

Stone's Cove is a resettled community in Fortune Bay, on the South Coast of Newfoundland. Sixty or seventy years ago, it had a thriving population of over three hundred people. Now there is almost nothing -- a wharf and a shed, and the foundations of several of the larger buildings, surrounded by overgrown leftover plants from the people's gardens. And on the beach is to be found a great deal of what people nowadays call beach glass -- pretty shards of broken glass, ground by the weather and by the stones and sand into hazy bright and smooth bits of glass. Local jewelry makers love to find the stuff and it is only on the rather more isolated beaches it can still be found. Like that in Stone's Cove, where we were last week. This evening, waiting for me to bring her supper, my wife stacked these found pieces. And after supper, waiting for the tea to steep, I shone a flashlight on them and took their picture.

Twenty minutes ago the International Space Station went over. In this picture, it is the brightest light in the sky, pretty dead centre, and making the apex of a kind of concave lens of the Big Dipper's handle. This was with my widest, fisheyeyest lens, by the way. Thus the weirdities. Our neighbourhood does not look like this.

It is a dark and clear night tonight so I took a picture of the Milky Way. I used my 8mm lens, the widest I have. I don't really know what the green glow on the horizon is. The view is looking South and there is not very much lit up in that direction. Probably the group of three service stations on the highway about twenty km from here. Being a minute and a half long, the picture shows each star as a short line rather than a pinpoint. I used a high ISO already but I may try it another time with an even higher one to shorten the shutter speed. I actually used a tripod. This tripod was a gift from my wife about 1980, a nice solid one. I hardly ever use it, nor any of the three or four lighter-weight ones I have. But it is better than trying to aim the camera when it sits on a railing.

I shot a perfectly respectable picture of the moon through the trees in the backyard a few minutes ago. This picture shows the Moon from that picture. But I then tried to lighten the shot to bring up the outlines of the trees' branches and leaves. That did not happen. Instead I got a large number of little dots of light. They were just digital noise but they looked a little like a sky full of stars. Liking that fakery, I cloned the moon back into the picture and this is the result. [Don't try to find any constellations. No, that is not Orion's belt.]

I wasn't paying close attention to where Jupiter's been lately. But a friend alerted me to how bright he is tonight in the sky, so I went outside and looked. My newish camera has a setting the manufacturer calls "Starry AF." Well you can imagine what I read that as. I set my camera at Starry AF and aimed it. And jammed my head against a wall for steadiness. I got this. Brilliant clear air in the sky here tonight. From left to right the Jovian moons are Callisto, Ganymede, Io, and Europa.