Waking early this morning (not too long after 06:00), looking out the bedroom window, I saw the decrescent moon plus Earthshine, as an almost perfect ◡ at 4% phase, and as the sky lightened, the crescent at least remained visible until gone 07:00, or less than 37.5 hours until the New Moon.
The clear evening sky is showing a 53 hour old crescent moon. Not a personal record, I think, but close. Venus emerged shortly after, lower in the sky, to the north.
Spotted the decrescent moon at 07:50, a fine arc in the lightening sky, 46h40m from new. I think that may be a personal record.
A short month, with snow, rain and other reasons to not stir from the house, so only up to 11,467.5, meaning 171.7 miles for the month, which is a dozen or so behind last February; but the 426.8 miles for the year to date is still 30 more than same time last year.
The slim crescent moon I saw at 06:40 on the 17th was actually less than two days before the new moon (23:49 on the 18th).
The greenhouse yielded a few belated ripe cherry-plum tomatoes, and some salad leaves, also from last year's crop.
By the start of this month, the sunrise is late enough that even though it's clear daylight when the alarm goes off, the sun has yet to clear the house across the road and stream into the bedroom. In the evening, we've lost two hours daylight since the peak, in terms of how long it stays light enough to read sitting outdoors on a clear evening.
Venus having been a bright evening star all spring, I caught a last glimpse at 21:36 on Saturday, courtesy of clear skies and an unobstructed horizon, nine days before it transits, and 15 minutes before spotting Vega as the first real star of the night. Subsequently the fine weather has been tending to leave cloud in the west at evening, before socking in completely now.
Well, it's been a busy month, hence quiet on the blogging front, starting out with:
While Karen was in hospital last year, I noticed a flyer for Vitalise respite care holidays in amongst various papers, and thought "Let's do this next summer."
So we did.
We chose the first week of July at the Netley Waterside centre as a part of the country neither of us had been to for many years, went through all the paperwork about care requirements and doctor's reports, and crossed our fingers about how well we would get on.
In the end, it was wonderful.
It started off a bit fraught, though; as on the outward journey on a too hot and bright day for comfortable travel, as we were going past Tring, I realised that amongst the things I'd forgotten to pack was my wallet. So I just unloaded Karen and all the other bits, and turned around, to drive down again the next day with all the stuff we've forgotten (doing in two days way more miles than I drive in the average month).
Going back home in the heat was not much fun, especially when combined with stumbling into special traffic arrangements for the Henley Regatta just as everyone was heading home for the evening. But at home, I was cheered to get a phone call from Karen, who was enjoying being able to choose her own bed time.
Second time around I was actually able to find a parking space (as holidays run Saturday to Saturday, the first time there were arrivals and departures jostling for space), freshen up and join the Sunday chill-out.
The centre is really on the water's edge
with the gardens sloping down to the path that runs along the sea wall, though the path is only wheelchair accessible in one direction.
Monday, we opted out of the excursion to the Sea Life Center, and after I'd scouted out the area, we went along to the local (the Prince Consort) and took advantage of the ramp up to the beer garden at back. to just sit, enjoy a pint and the summer weather, the two of us on holiday together for the first time in years.
But that was the end of the good weather; cooler, windier and wet was the order of the day for the rest of the week. Tuesday's expedition to the Hawk Conservancy Trust at Andover was dampened by the rain arriving as we did, and continuing at varying strength until we left; but despite the weather, the display was spectacular, with sometimes a dozen birds in the air.
We did manage to miss the rain for Wednesday's visit to Marwell Zoo, which we only manage to see less than half of; Thursday started wet, so the planned trip to Winchester became a shopping center trip, which we opted out of; and the Friday was an official at-leisure day where we took the opportunity to slope off to the pub (using the industrial strength ramp for the front step) for lunch.
And so, home.
For the holiday, there was the inevitable fact of separate hospital beds for sleeping; the food all home cooked, if unadventurous, with a very early 18:00 dinner time, with breakfast being as much a main meal as that in the evening.
Karen really enjoyed the comparative freedom to choose a bed time -- including at well gone midnight on Thursday, when it was party night.
And for me -- well, when I helped Karen with chasing the last morsels of a meal around a plate, I was told off, that one of the volunteers should do that while I enjoyed a break!
The volunteers are a key part of the operation -- a cheerful, enthusiastic and cosmopolitan crowd from all over the globe, working for bed and board, to just take over much of the step-and-fetch level care, from simply getting a cup of coffee, to pushing manual chairs while accompanying otherwise unaccompanied guests.
So, we'll be back, though next time, assuming I don't have to do the trip 3 times in quick succession, we may opt out of scheduled trips and do our own at our own pace (without being caught up in the half hour or more loading and unloading process).
Trivia -- at just before 10pm on Monday the 4th, I observed a 60-hour old nail-paring crescent moon setting over the port, the sun having set 40 minutes before.
And today has been our Pearl wedding. Doesn't time fly!
Logistics being what they are, celebration was lunch, at the recently refurbished Carpenters Arms at Gt. Wilbraham. Being a Sunday, that meant roast, but by being so standard, allowed a like-for-like comparison : big chunks of roast, huge selection of veg, and the best Yorkshire pudding I've eaten in years.
I this up picked up now it's out here on DVD, having heard of it some months ago.
The film is pure hokum wire-fu, and about as faithful to any of the source material as most movies (about on the level of the wartime Sherlock Holmes vs. Nazi spy films) but entertaining enough for an evening's viewing.
While van Gulik is in the writing credits according to imdb, I saw nothing of what he did by way of exhuming Chinese detective stories (except possibly the fact of popularising Judge Dee in the west) made it into the movie.
Seeing this after lunch today, we caught the UK theatrical dub (separate UK production team mentioned in the end credits, and some English regional accents -- most noticeably for the rat catchers -- amongst the cast).
It's been a long long time since I read the original (I have slightly more memories of Adrift and Aloft than of Afield), but the adaptation felt right, though one wonders if it wasn't the speech about the Borrowers dying out that attracted Miyazaki, something to slide in as a soapboxing scene.
Overall, the best thing out of Ghibli since The Cat Returns.
This morning at 07:13, about 35 minutes before sunrise, the sky was pale in the east with the approaching dawn -- and when I went downstairs, the just-past-full moon was casting shadows in the dining room.
The cats all agreed that this was good for their crepuscular activites.
Following up from here.
Units of measure are indeed useful, especially once one has twigged that the syntax needed to generalize over the units involved is like
and that you need to go the F# built-in math functions to have ones that are themselves so generalised.
So, here is the mostly essentially finished example applet (still needs to compute and draw the moon phases) with source bundled into the .xap file
A blanket of rain clouds hid the full moon that was both close to perigee and close to the winter solstice last night; but Thursday's clear night was very bright and steely grey, sparkling in hard frost under a cloudless sky with a near as makes no difference full moon.
Thursday morning just gone, stumbling downstairs in the dark at twenty to seven, to see the cats sitting at the patio doors, looking out, with the just-past-full moonlight streaming in.
A* in Scala -- would be a fairly mechanical translation of the F# version with probably more explicit type declarations. The F# inference of a numeric type for operator < and + fails, so those operations on generic type B have to be pulled into a Graph[A,B] trait.
A few apples still left on the Bramley, and a lot on the Charles Ross. And this lunchtime, a tortoiseshell butterfly and a fallen leaf lying side by side on the picnic table, looking almost the same at first glance.
A chance to rediscover how pleasant spring twilight can be. Refreshing cool, after the warmth of the day, and with the east wind died down (which had made if a bit of an effort for cycling home).
A very thin crescent moon visible, with increasing contrast, between 21:05 and 21;25, before getting lost in the horizon clutter.
Bright and sunny today, with early frost soon melting in the sun. Almost spring-like in fact, and enough that I was out in the garden until 5pm, without a jacket, just a T-shirt, starting to clear up the debris of last season, until I had almost filled the green bin. And as the weather forecast for tomorrow is much the same, I shall have to mow the lawn.
I'm glad for the Gulf Stream and the current state of La Niña, which is managing to keep Western Europe free from the current hemispheric freeze
How long will that last, though? On top of a current global cooling trend over the last decade (source data here), not only do we have suggestions that this La Niña looks like the start of the previous cooling around 1950 (PDF), but also that the current solar weather prospects are not looking healthy, either.
Well, I knew my old age was going to be cold -- if it wasn't the recently bandied about prospect of a meltwater induced suppression of the North Atlantic Convergence, then it was going to be the end of the current extended interglacial as promised when I was a kid. I just hadn't thought it might simply be another Maunder or Dalton minimum.
I see one silver lining, though. Work has been done on orbital solar mirrors, building off Soviet-era proposals to open up Siberia. Commercial space travel is on the cusp of reality. I see a natural fit there. And the lull in solar magnetic activity and associated particle storms will open up space for longer term inhabitation for some decades.
And by then, Bussard fusion (long video here) should be old technology, and we could be on track for the future as it was in the 1960s.
Post title is a slight reference to Wilson Tucker's time-travel story, Year of the Quiet Sun.
Yesterday it was sunny, if breezy, comfortable enough to walk around town with T-shirt and sandals, amongst all the odd folk dressing by the calendar.
Saw the 37 hour old moon, a thin paring of light in the twilight sky, conjunct with Venus, at 5pm (new moon JAN. 19 4h01 UTC)
Driving to work this morning, the sun was rising behind me and the moon, full hours before, setting in the pale light ahead of me.
And a double-decker school bus was stuck behind a horse for quite a while, with me a few cars behind that.
Some of the Huygens images look rather like aerial views of an Earthly coastline, don't they?
The little black dot fades into the limb darkening. Something I shan't see again.
Yes, I'm watching the transit of Venus - it's amazingly clear just projected with a pair of binoculars onto a piece of card. A black dot about 1mm across near the top of the (inverted) solar image, when the disk is about 30mm across. You can tell that it's solar minimum - apart from that, there are no other blemishes, just the limb darkening.
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