Month: January 2023

Moon Reflections at Night

In tidying up photos on my computer recently, I found this one that reminded me of the calm before the holidays descended back in mid-December.

I had begun to crawl into bed for the night and with the lights off my attention was taken by the unusual glow of the moon in combination with the blue tones in the sky with the twinkle of a few stars that were starting to become visible. I snagged my phone off of the night stand and gave it the best shot I could at taking the photo. (Anyone who has ever tried to photograph the moon or stars at night with a smart phone knows, it’s never a great shot). But there was just something about the fact that while it wasn’t a perfect capture of the moon, it was not a bad capture of the sky’s dark blue tones with the stars.

A pair of windows is positioned just over the head of our bed and it makes for wonderful stargazing if I lay on my back and look upwards through into the night sky. On this night I knelt on my pillow and stared outwards at the candle-colored moon glow over the valley that our house sits above. The sky was unusually clear and almost everything out there was illuminated (apart from the light you see in the grass from our security lights).

It just goes to show that it is not always the perfect picture that we enjoy so much, but it’s what we felt and what we remember when we see that photo later that makes them enjoyable. This picture reminds me how in awe I was to be able to see light from the sun reflecting off of the moon, to the dark side of the earth, is a wonder and creates such beauty for our eyes to feast on.

Frosty Forecast that Missed the Mark

Rocky outcroppings hidden by low-hanging clouds.

This weekend’s forecast of 6-10 inches in our area produced barely an inch (not even half) of accumulation. A lot of ice, a lot of short hoar frost, but not the major weather even predicted.

Our area is notorious for poor weather forecasts. Based on my time living here (five years so far), it seems 8-9 of every 10 meteorological estimates are a total miss or greatly off.

We could still see the valley and meandering North Fork Crow Creek this morning.

The stillness of this kind of winter is contemplative. Especially when one is a bit isolated. Weather has a way of slowing us down, making us more thoughtful about moving around and other things. It is almost like a frozen hall pass to stay in, do only the necessary and stop the rush of things.

Curtains of gray wrap around nearly every horizon.

This coldness, despite the lack of accumulation, wrapped everything in sight in gray blankets of clouds, fog and frost.

Minor hoar frost appears on some surfaces.

I never get tired of seeing hoar frost. It is a bit magical having come from the southeastern US where I had not seen it before. I suppose that as long as I live where it appears, I will always want to step outside and look at it.

Exterior door handle with frost.

Even as I turned around on our front porch to head back inside after my impromptu photos, there is a little Jack Frost there on the door too.

Porch post with frost following the wood grain.

Even the wood grain of the posts that support our front porch put on their own little show of crystalline frost when examined closely enough to see. This is just the start of winter here, so I look forward to a few days of warming trends hopefully soon until the next batch of frozen stuff comes around.