Perhaps the only bright side (heh-heh) to the horrible, horrible weather we’ve had the last two months is that the sky was actually clear a fair amount of the time. I didn’t think it possible to get any more grey an gloomy than Seattle during the winter, but there seems to be a law in Ohio that sunlight is prohibited from directly striking the ( Read more... )

Hot diggety dog-for the first time, I saw three sliver moons associated with the same new moon ( Read more... )

Looks like I’m about to set a new record for late-posting a Sliver Moon update. I actually have a sliver moon backup. And for good reason: to make a very long story short, thanks to being assigned a last-minute teaching duty this semester, I’ve done hardly anything the last six weeks except work, sleep and freak out (in every possible ( Read more... )

After about two weeks of unrelenting overcast, we finally got some clear sky late yesterday afternoon-just in time for SLIVER MOON! The sky after sunset was one of those crystal-clear sunsets with an entire rainbow of colors and nearly infinite visibility-the kind we only get in the Midwest when it’s about 2 °F outside. In fact, it was fully ten ( Read more... )

It’s been a while, eh? Alas, I really haven’t felt like writing in yonks ( Read more... )

It’s a new record for delay in a sliver moon report! The sliver moon window will open again on Friday, and yet I’m only now recording last month’s sliver moon sighting.

I’ve seen many a sliver moon since I began this journal, but I believe this is the first one that I sighted from an airplane (and only from an airplane). We’re at the time of ( Read more... )

I really hate insomnia. Overall, I’m getting an adequate amount of sleep; but in any one night I’m getting either two hours or twelve hours, with nothing in between. Luckily, it’s only a matter of time before my wildly oscillating sleep schedule dampens down and I can reliably zonk out more or less through the night again ( Read more... )

In honor of today’s blue moon*-the last until July 31, 2015-I’m posting my last sliver moon sighting a full two weeks late. This time of year, an evening sliver moon is nearly impossible to see this far north unless you have a good view of the western horizon and a crystal-clear sky-and most of the time I’m 0 for 2. I must rely on my almost ( Read more... )

Alas, it’s getting to be the time of year when evening sliver moons are exceptionally difficult to spot before they set. Luckily, last Saturday’s two-day sliver moon was but a couple of hours short of a three-day crescent; so not only was it still in the sky a half hour after sunset, but since it was blazing away at magnitude -7.2, it easily ( Read more... )

The weather over the last month has alternated between “tolerable” and “infernal.” Last Thursday was definitely the latter, with a high temperature over 90 °F and dew point well into the 70s. On a day like that, you have to put your Slurpee on an entire mound of towels, or the lake of condensation will engulf the tabletop and run off directly ( Read more... )