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My partner and I have always been interested in the night sky.
We would catch all the meteor showers,
usually in a sleeping bag with a thermos of coffee.
Now we don't stay up that late,
but we still hold hands in the backyard,
looking at the Moon and the planets and the stars.
And during our many camping trips,
we make sure the girls have the chance to see things our light-polluted city hides:
the Milky Way and all of the stars.
On the night of the full Moon, they have a sweet treat and usually stay up to see it rise.
This March full Moon, the Full Worm Moon, or the Full Sap Moon,
was rising under a partially cloudy sky,
so even fewer stars than normal were visible,
but the movement of the clouds was very beautiful.
We moved into the darker backyard....
we protect our eyes as much as possible to preserve our night-vision.
Planes occasionally moved through the clouds,
appearing as streaks on my camera.
I like to focus the camera into a very dark place,
then release the shutter on the night sky.
I also increased the white balance and my ISO.
The line of three stars marks the belt of the hunter Orion.
The top left star is Betelgeuse and the bottom right is Rigel.
Not visible is the sword of Orion, hanging down from the belt.
In the sword area is the Orion Nebula, where stars are born.
With our regular binoculars (as good or better than the early telescopes used by Galileo!)
we can see the nebula as a hazy cloud.
A good trick to using binoculars is to to focus your eyes on the object
and then raise the binoculars to your eyes.
The light pollution is something that I didn't anticipate when moving to a neighborhood.
I look forward to the leaves budding out and blocking these street lights.
But other constellations are still visible,
and we point out Castor and Pollux of Gemini to our twins,
as well as the Big Dipper/Ursa Major, Polaris the star and Canis Major and its bright star Sirius.
Jupiter and Venus are in the western sky right now.
They are the brightest objects, next to the Moon of course,
with Venus (on the bottom) being even brighter than Jupiter.
With our binoculars or spotting scope, we can see some of the many moons of Jupiter.
The summer time will bring less interesting constellations,
and more haze,
but we'll still stretch out under the stars, either on a blanket or snuggled under one.
~carrie~
