Sliver Moon XXXII
Thursday’s sliver moon promised to be a beaut: a 36-hour sliver moon just above Mercury, with Venus keeping station some distance away. We had a record-breaking warm day on Thursday-the fifth high-temperature record tied or broken this month!-and a lot of warm-weather haze in the evening, but the sliver moon was just able to shine through; and boy, was it slivery. Even Venus was distinctly oranged by the dust in the air, and the moon was a reddish, hair-thin quarter arc. Mercury, needless to say, was lost in the murk.
I think 36 h is the sliveriest moon I’ve seen since we moved to the Midwest. Shortly before we moved from Seattle I spied a one-day sliver moon early one morning as I got ready for a trip to Portland. That was a lucky sighting. I could hardly see any arc at all; it was hardly more than a slash across the sunrise.
Friday’s 2 1/2-day sliver moon was unusual only because it was so high in the sky after sunset that I could see it from my office window, above the next-door neighbor’s roof. That’s a first in three years of living here. The sliver moon didn’t set until nearly three hours after the sun; but I couldn’t witness that rare event because five minutes after I first spied the moon, a gigantic raft of storm clouds tore overhead and plunged us into complete darkness. It was almost as if someone has switched off the sun. And Saturday morning on our way to breakfast, we watched a few flakes of snow drifting down. Sigh.
I think 36 h is the sliveriest moon I’ve seen since we moved to the Midwest. Shortly before we moved from Seattle I spied a one-day sliver moon early one morning as I got ready for a trip to Portland. That was a lucky sighting. I could hardly see any arc at all; it was hardly more than a slash across the sunrise.
Friday’s 2 1/2-day sliver moon was unusual only because it was so high in the sky after sunset that I could see it from my office window, above the next-door neighbor’s roof. That’s a first in three years of living here. The sliver moon didn’t set until nearly three hours after the sun; but I couldn’t witness that rare event because five minutes after I first spied the moon, a gigantic raft of storm clouds tore overhead and plunged us into complete darkness. It was almost as if someone has switched off the sun. And Saturday morning on our way to breakfast, we watched a few flakes of snow drifting down. Sigh.