Colors of Spring: Eclipsing Venus

This morning's sky was practically apocalyptic. I've been watching Jupiter, the crescent moon, and Venus for several days now, getting up in the dark pre-dawn, checking out their changing positions in the east, and then hopping back into bed before it got cold. But this morning was the moment it's all been building up to. The moon's been sliding down the sky toward the sun from Jupiter's position a quarter up the sky since Sunday, and now it reached Venus--what a show! When I first saw the moon and Venus rising through a band of haze, they were brilliant but rusty, quickly changing to a pure white crescent with Venus' bright splinter about a moon's width below and to the left. Over the next hour the moon sidled closer as the sky lightened and the multitude of stars vying for attention faded (if you ever find yourself needing to know the time, and you can't see your watch, watch the moon--it travels about its own width eastward in around an hour. Of course that's approximate, but most people using the moon for time don't need things to be all that precise.) The low band of cloud on the horizon caught fire, and the two were close enough to kiss, and then as the first rays of the sun speared into the sky, the Venus splinter, much brighter than the now fragile-looking moon, suddenly was gone--blip! Show over, back to bed long enough to warm up the feet.

As if all that wasn't enough, the Lyrid meteor shower supposedly peaked at around 5:00, when the constellation Lyra was directly overhead. But I'm never good at meteor showers somehow. Oh, Lyra was lovely, and I think I saw a satellite, but never a meteor. Maybe it's just that they're so quiet.

I did try to take some photos of the moon/Venus conjunction, but here's where these little digital cameras fail totally. It's always interesting how something that can look big and impressive to the eye, but the camera shows how tiny in the face of the universe things really are; I suppose it's a matter of attention. I imagine real astronomer photographers have taken lovely photos, and they will appear shortly. But I'm including a couple of mine just because they are interesting in their own funky way

Colors of Spring: The Return of Peeping Season

Things are getting busy on the farm, even with the usual questionable spring weather. Our batch of new chicks arrived in the mail about a week ago, so we have now around 75 baby chickens in the brooder in Wendy's bedroom. There were 150 when they arrived, all yelling at the top of their little lungs (and you wouldn't believe how loud one chickie can be). It took them several hours to realize they were now in a warm place with food ("What's that?") and water ("What's this?"), and the noise level dropped by several decibles. Of course it went back up when we turned out the light for the night ("Oh, no, the sun exploded, and the world is ending!"), leaving them in the dark on their their heating pads. We have farmed out, so to speak, about half of them, and the ones we have left seem happy and are growing. They still object to the disappearance of the light at night, but in about half an hour they've all dropped off to sleep, with the exception of the one that gets lost and can't figure out how to find its friends. Peep, peeeeep, peep! Peep.

The weather is, yes, questionable. We've been getting one or two storms per week, mostly wind and mostly dry. The routine is to get temps in the low 70's the afternoon before, then wind, wind, beastly wind for one to two days, then clearing at night so there's nothing to hold in the heat, followed by mornings in the teens and cold breezy days. This is hard on the plants which are trying to come up, and of course the blooming trees have quit blooming and are thinking hard about whether it's worth trying to put out leaves. A few of them just give up ("No, I can't go on, call me when it's June"). The chickens and other birds look like feather puffballs in the wind, but they do okay, and the pigeons like to do wild pinwheels together in the gales. I'm glad somebody can enjoy this, because we humans tend to get depressed on really windy days.

Others have it worse, I know. These storms come down the western side of the Rockies, hit us here at the end of those mountains, hang a sharp left and barrel out into the plains, where they run into warmer, moister air and then all Hell breaks loose. No use feeling guilty for living where those storms whip around the corner, gaining energy, and you people out there in the midwest know about the tornadoes, so just a warning: Hunker down, and may you come safely through.