Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Everybody saw this coming.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Second rate reporter says what?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Not all heroes wear capes.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Don’t Forget the Eclipse

Don’t Forget the Eclipse

by | 108 Comments

This post is in: 

Watching a lunar eclipse is easy, safe and fun. Sky and Telescope has a good article with times and explanations. The Clear Sky Clock is a good resource to see if you’ll be under clouds tonight. All the equipment you need is your two eyes, though binoculars or a small telescope make it even more interesting.

(The photo is a merged set of shots I took during the last eclipse visible from my location in 2004.)

Reader Interactions

108Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Why do lunar eclipses always have to take place in the middle of the night? I need my beauty sleep. :(

  5. 5.

    General Stuck

    I think the total eclipse begins at 12;40 MST. It is party cloudy here in the SW desert, but if I don’t get too sleepy, will check it out. Last time one happened on Winter Solstice, they were still burning witches at the stake, I think.

  6. 6.

    beltane

    I remember the lunar eclipse of 2004, on a cold and clear night. With heavy cloud cover, I don’t think we’ll see any of this one.

  10. 10.

    asiangrrlMN

    @J. Michael Neal: I am here. I heard about it earlier. I have a game for anyone who drinks. Every time there’s mention of ‘love of the game’, ‘he’s like a kid out there’, how tough Brett Favre is or how amazing he is, drink! Y’all should be trashed by now.

    P.S. Got a TD. That’s good.

    @Yutsano: Hiya. We have a snow emergency, but people managed to make it to the game.

  11. 11.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    They said something on the news here locally about “optimum viewing time will be 3:15 am” yeah well, the only optimum viewing I am going to be doing at 3:15 am is the inside of my eyelids.

  13. 13.

    cckids

    It is cloudy & rainy here too, all day, for 2+ days now. IN VEGAS!! My son has been doing the happy dance, but my daughter & I wanted to watch the eclipse. Why does our once-in-5 year rain have to fall tonight?

  14. 14.

    Yutsano

    @J. Michael Neal: Hehehehe. Okay, I’ll go with that.

    @asiangrrlMN: They. Cannot. Stop. Polishing. His. Knob. Retire already. And this time STAY retired.

    EDIT: we may needs football open thread. mistermix is gonna yell at us to get off his lawn otherwise.

  16. 16.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: “He was supposed to just go on IR for the rest of the season, but not Superman. Oh no!!” Friend told me that Suzy Colbert said there was one name bigger than Mother Nature’s–Brett Favre. Apparently, she wasn’t being hyperbolic, either.

    GAAAAH!

  17. 17.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud #2:

    Why do lunar eclipses always have to take place in the middle of the night? I need my beauty sleep.

    YEAH. And why do fuckin’ SOLAR eclipses always happen during the day when I’m at work? I need to earn a living.

  20. 20.

    gbear

    @asiangrrlMN: My boss is at the game tonight. He was going to walk the mile from his house to the stadium (which is probably faster than driving given the road conditions and traffic). Hope he’s having fun.

  26. 26.

    Redshirt

    Anyone remember “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”? I recall being blown away by the prediction of the eclipse, and the effect it had, and vowed to learn how he could do that. I did! Eclipse prediction rules, thanks to Newton.

  27. 27.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @Yutsano:

    Same here on the coast at the Cal/Ore border, socked in solid so no playing with the telescope tonight. We’ve been having intermittent thunder and lightning for the last two days but luckily no power outages, just surges and drops (thank goodness for APCs!). The sound of rain drumming on the roof is nice to fall asleep to but our weather isn’t having any of that. It was so loud last night it sounded like they diverted the river to a point just above our house. Mix with 30-40 mile winds and you get some real fun!

    I had to fill five gallon jugs with water and put them in the bottom of our garbage can to get it to stay in place out at the curb (3-4 am pickup).

  30. 30.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: I’m about to go simmer some lentils and onions in chicken stock, then when said lentils are tender, shred in chicken and call it grub. It’s not quite risotto but it’ll do. And yeah I have an appetite now where I didn’t earlier. So I’m slowly improving thanks.

  31. 31.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: Is not playing. I am not happy. Oh, gee. An interception by Favre. What a surprise. But, a flag. Offsides.

    OK, I just have to say: Get the fuck over him already, guys. He needs to be put in the goddamn cellar and not let out for the rest of eternity. For fuck’s sake, stop acting like he’s the second coming.

    And, interception for real. But, he plays for the love of the game, so it’s all right!

    Whyfore I no have permission to edit? FYWP.

    @stuckinred: Damn right. Cole doesn’t give a shit about us non-Stillers fans. And, we have a snow emergency. I wouldn’t expect the house to be full. Up to seven inches around the metro.

  33. 33.

    Cat Lady

    The lunar eclipse in 2004 was the night the Red Sox won the World Series. It literally took the heavens aligning. That’s auspicious, bitchez!

  40. 40.

    PeakVT

    Cloudy with a chance of flurries for me. The snow here in town reflects all of the streetlights, so the light pollution is horrible in the winter.

  41. 41.

    Redshirt

    @Cat Lady: Oh, Cat Lady, you know, you know. The moon turned freaking red as the Sox were about to win the WS (or was it beat the Yankees?). I lived about .25 miles from Fenway at the time, so I went out onto my roof, joined the party, watched the moon turn red over my head, listening/watching to the city come alive (and creepy black helicopters floating somewhere above). Talk about back of the neck hair moments. Tinglingelicious!

  44. 44.

    Redshirt

    @wag: Yeah, the Greeks knew lots of stuff. Unfortunately, our Hard Drive got wiped and we had to reload all our programs, which took about 1400 years, alas.

    Seriously, though, if nothing else, praise Allah for reintroducing Greek wisdom back into our society.

  45. 45.

    Triassic Sands

    All the equipment you need is your two eyes, though binoculars or a small telescope make it even more interesting.

    I have a small telescope (high quality optics) and it doesn’t really improve a lunar eclipse. (It’s great for solar eclipses, because filtration allows you to look directly at the sun and get a great close-up view.)

  50. 50.

    Mnemosyne

    It seems like there’s always some idiot on the news talking about how it’s an “El Nino year” every time Los Angeles clouds over even a little bit but, ladies and germs, this is what a real El Nino year in Los Angeles actually looks like.

    That’s not “there’s a chance of rain.” That’s “it will rain continuously for at least another 48 hours.” I can personally vouch for the fact that it literally has not stopped raining all goddamned day.

    (The good news is, our unusually cool summer means that we didn’t have any major fires, so there’s a chance that our hillsides will stay in place.)

  51. 51.

    Yutsano

    @Redshirt:

    Seriously, though, if nothing else, praise Allah for reintroducing Greek wisdom back into our society.

    No one should tell the teatards that fact. Their delicate fee-fees would never recover.

  56. 56.

    Yutsano

    @stuckinred: You do realize if the Vikes lose this game they will blame the field/the cold/the lack of fan support/insert bitch about not playing in Dome here. It will never be the fault of Old Man Yells at Football, and how dare you make such a suggestion?

  57. 57.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Okay, I’m going to try to grab a little sleep, but I’ve set the alarm to ring in about 4-1/2 hours from now and if the spotty clouds are willing I’ll see you all at an eclipse live-blogging. (The night crew for sure and anyone else who’s geeky about solstices and eclipses.)

    :: waves, blows kisses ::

    Later!

  59. 59.

    Dennis SGMM

    @Mnemosyne:
    We’re in the San Gabriel foothills and it’s been raining steadily for three days. The bad news is that most of our north-south south streets (The ones pointed at the mountains) are under water curb-to-curb. The good news is that you can boogie board on the standing waves at the corners.

  65. 65.

    Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen

    Yeah I was all psyched for it, especially since the sky is completely clear here. Then I read the optimum viewing time for the Liberal Elitist Left Coast is 3 am-ish.

    Hell with that. I’ll sacrifice the three black cockerels at midnight and go to bed.

  66. 66.

    Left Coast Tom

    @Mnemosyne: There’s also the fact that, if the child’s sex is in any way decided by surface ocean temperatures, this is actually a _la Nina_ year.

  68. 68.

    Comrade Mary

    Maudit. It was partly cloudy here most of the evening, but I could still see the full moon in the southern sky. Now it’s hazy all over.

    I’ll go out on my bike with my camera at 2:30 nonetheless. I want my bloody moon! (Err, let’s just call the timing of this event triply auspicious :-)

    @MikeJ: Nice! WANT.

  70. 70.

    Dennis SGMM

    @stuckinred:
    Glendora Mountain Road starts about six blocks from our home. You can take it up to the Baldy cutoff and then it’s on to the mountain. The drive is roughly twenty miles of breath taking vistas (And intimidating drop offs). One of the best parts for me is that most of it is part of the Angeles National Forest so once you get up into the mountains you can look across miles of saw tooth peaks and see Los Angeles and then the ocean in the distance.

  71. 71.

    frosty

    @stuckinred: I was living in Upland in ’78 when we had the heaviest rainfall I could remember in my years in SoCal. Euclid Avenue was underwater. Fast water, too, since it was downslope of Mt. Baldy. Sounds like this year is wetter?

  72. 72.

    Redshirt

    I spent a “vacation” in Santa Barbara in late December 2004, and it rained for 7 out of my 8 days, I think. And heavy rains, not a drizzle. I tried to take it in stride – refilling the aquifers! But damn is it hard not to be selfish in that situation. Also, there was that whole tsunami thing, which was a wet, wet bummer to be sure. Coupled with W’s re-election (thanks Cole!), I was rather despondent about the state of things. At the time.

  74. 74.

    Left Coast Tom

    The next thread (the one with Sherman) seems to need a cleanup in aisle 26…I tried to post that there and found myself redirected to a thread from October.

  76. 76.

    stuckinred

    @Dennis SGMM: We lived in Whittier and would drive on 2 lane roads, I think through Pomona. I remember listing to “The Shadow” in the car on the long drive home. It was all agriculture then. Hell, there was nothing but Oranges in Orange county then.

  79. 79.

    Dennis SGMM

    @stuckinred:
    My parents moved us here in ’61 after Dad retired from the Navy. At that time, the East end of the San Gabriel Valley (Glendora, Charter Oak, San Dimas) was still more citrus and avocado groves than houses. Two of the old packing houses from the heyday of citrus were still standing in Glendora. It was a wonderful place to be a kid.

  80. 80.

    J. Michael Neal

    I just want the snow to end tonight. At 3pm tomorrow afternoon, I start my 12 hour drive to Ann Arbor, plus time for dinner with friends in Madison and a couple of pit stops.

    I’d really prefer it if the states of Illinois and Wisconsin have had time to salt I-94, and the various derivatives I switch to from Madison to Indiana.

  87. 87.

    J. Michael Neal

    @asiangrrlMN: I think Webb has reached the point of sucking. 4 yards per attempt and an ugly INT. He isn’t sucking any more than one should expect a third string QB with no previous experience to suck, but he’s sucking.

    Anyone who expected a home team to win on that field was dreaming. And, yes, I still think that the win over Iowa was a dream.

  89. 89.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dennis SGMM:

    We’re in the Verdugo foothills, so more like Glendale/Montrose/La Canada. Neither of us lived here when there were orange groves — we both came out to college in sunny California after the infamous 83 below zero winter in Chicago and never went back.

    @Left Coast Tom:

    I’m not exactly sure, but that article in the LA Times seemed to indicate that they were expecting a La Nina (dry) winter and got the opposite, which I thought was an El Nino. But IANAM (I am not a meteorologist).

  92. 92.

    Steeplejack

    @asiangrrlMN:

    I agree. What we’re seeing isn’t pretty, but for a guy who had, what, a total of six previous snaps of NFL experience, he’s doing pretty well. The problem is that the defense knows the Vikes’ sets and plays much better than he does and they’re just lying in wait for him.

    But, gosh, with an aging, increasingly erratic starting quarterback, why would the Vikes need to have, like, a good backup waiting in the wings? That’s crazy talk.

  93. 93.

    Yutsano

    @Steeplejack: I find your lack of faith in Old Man Yells at Football disturbing. I mean, he plays for the love of the game, man. The love of the game! It’s nothing but pure heart and selfless joy that makes Brett do what he does.

    (okay I can’t take it seriously either. But some douchebag sports writer will come up with some bullpuckey like that.)

  94. 94.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Mnemosyne: I KNOW! I mean, I know they feel they have to talk all the time, but really?

    @Steeplejack: “And when you pay that kind of money to Brett Favre to be your quarterback, you don’t bench him. You just don’t.” Thank you, Troy Aikman. Gaaah! How you be? Surviving retail hell?

    @Yutsano: He’s like a kid out there. He has a gunslinger mentality. He wasn’t supposed to start, and then he did. That’s Brett Favre!

    ETA: You know, I am so pop culturally illiterate that when you started calling Favre the Old Man Who Yells at Clouds, I thought you had made it up.

  95. 95.

    Steeplejack

    @Yutsano:

    What killed me is that I didn’t see/hear anybody in the sports media consider even for a moment the notion that Favre starting so soon after his injury might not be the bestest thing evah for the Vikes. It was all about him, his love of the game, his competitive drive, etc., etc.

  96. 96.

    Steeplejack

    @asiangrrlMN:

    How you be? Surviving retail hell?

    Covered it pretty well downstairs. Shorter version: Just finishing my Sunday-Monday weekend. I have to go in an hour early each morning this week for “holiday hours,” but I think the morning/afternoon will be better than afternoon/evening, as far as the crazy factor goes. And I’ll have a nice three-day weekend for Christmas. So I’m trying to look on the bright side.

  97. 97.

    Yutsano

    @Steeplejack: Well yeah. It doesn’t fit in with the narrative of the grizzled veteran fighting it out one last time if he just lets his injury heal. Plus I bet he’s pissed his consecutive start streak is over so he just wanted to shiv it to whoever decided to pull him last week.

  101. 101.

    Zuzu's Petals

    @stuckinred:

    I remember that…orange groves in Orange County. And when Newport Beach was a sleepy little beach town; the cannery actually canned fish off of fishing boats docked in the harbor…last I heard it was a boutique.

  103. 103.

    Comrade Mary

    It’s -14 in Toronto with wind chill, but pretty damn clear. The moon was more pink and grey than blood red, but I think the combo of city haze, light pollution and maybe a bit of cloud contributed to it.

    WICKED cold, though. I went to a nearby McDonalds to get warm between chunk-gone and totality, but I was still so cold outside that my little camera took absolutely crappy pictures while I was shivering. It was sweet seeing the various employees sneak out to take pictures with their crappy camera phones.

    (asiangrrl, totality will hang around for a while. Run outside!)

  104. 104.

    Left Coast Tom

    @Mnemosyne: “Dry” versus “Wet” are normal (not guaranteed) impacts of “la Nina” versus “el Nino” in the LA area – the Pacific Northwest has been wet as well, and it’s normally the opposite. “la Nina” and “el Nino” are ocean currents. The current temperature map shows a cold eastern pacific and warm western Pacific, which is a la Nina condition.

    I’m not a meteorologist either, but the weather service has pretty decent pages on current conditions. Wikipedia has an overview which includes links to other interesting pages.

  106. 106.

    Tom Hilton

    @Left Coast Tom: Damn. I’ve been hoping for a drier winter than last year, when we had a really late (short) backpacking season. I won’t be alive that many more summers, so if this one is late as well it’s really going to piss me off.

  107. 107.

    Left Coast Tom

    @Tom Hilton: Last year had a very cold spring as well, slowing the melt. So in the alternative you can hope for a normal to warm spring.

    Second weekend of June I was snow camping near Carson Pass, bundled against strong winds on the snowshoe into Fourth of July Lake, and wearing shorts and t-shirt on the trip out.

  108. 108.

    Jay in Oregon

    I missed the lunar eclipse on the winter solstice (dammit), but I look forward in 16 years to when the growing army of sorcerer-kings comes of age and begins their necromantic reign of terror.

    (Memo to the SyFy Network: if you use this for one of your direct-to-cable releases, I WANT MY CUT!)

Comments are closed.