Desert sky report.
First, a vignette (eyepiece hasn’t got enough eye relief for the phone camera) of the moon about 36 hours after the totality visible from Antarctica.
A day later with Venus, which shows last quarter from 20s on a tripod. Some overcast.
I don’t know why I am compelled to tell
@Laughing Grass this. I may have imagined she said something a year ago.
On cold calm nights, the desert develops a shallow but intense inversion layer. Once the sun rises, this layer thickens and dissipates. But along the way, it casts mirages. Here is a grow op a coupla miles away, funhouse mirror style. I think that’s a fence post buzzard in foreground.
Wave clouds the day before the rain. This is a lovely diaphanous one dissipating.
Others built in as the storm came closer.
Space whale? With abstract calf.
This am: sailors take warning.
Storm incoming
Storm breaking up
Not a bad planespotting week. A Global Hawk at full altitude. That mysterious old four-engined NASA jetliner type. A -22 doing expensive happy bullshit. Coupla -18s and a -16 doing what I think of as “Air Force tai chi”, going through air combat maneuvers at like 1/4 speed.
A T-38 in that nice white NASA livery headed west. When it came east, I swept it up in the binos, and bonus! It was 100 feet off the wing of the white Eagle that sometimes comes through.
There is a local person who operates a Fouga Magister trainer from early-50s France. A very elegant V-tailed ship with two tiny turbojets that don’t make for a whole lotta top speed.
I saw it on two occasions, luxuriating in aerobatic maneuvers. Now there was somebody successful, having the time of his life at 3000 feet bending a French trainer to his will! Yeeeeee!
On the old trainer front, twice I heard and then saw a white straight-wing ship (tentatively a Macchi 38
at contrail altitude. Pretty sure it’s operated by the private Test Pilot School out of Mojave.
Oh. Saw the comet Tuesday 5am.