Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 

Pre-Blizzard Sun Dogs from our lane (photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison)

It's almost Christmas and I just wanted to take a moment and wish everyone the best this season!  Unfortunately for many it is also bad weather timing!  We have a really nasty blizzard here as I type...started yesterday and is still going strong here this late afternoon.  Visibility can be measured in "Feet" here right now...it is insane.

Yesterday morning when the above photo was taken, it was 18 below zero with a near 50 below zero windchill.  It was just kicking up the wind when this was taken.

 

Sun Dogs at full arc over the barn (photograph - © Bruce A. Morrison)

The next photo was taken this morning at about a quarter to ten...I was out trying to start the pickup/plow and saw the arc...WHOA!  I ran into the studio and grabbed the camera.  I backed up as far as I could up the lane past the barn but ran up against some very high drifts and the studio orchard fence...this was as much as I could manage in one shot.  

It is only the second full arc sun dog I have ever witnessed.  I took another very similar image of the first one here a few years back.  The snow was beginning to kick up so bad that I was lucky I spotted it before the winds just blotted it out!  It's been a terrible afternoon - much worse than yesterday.

The county plows have been pulled off the roads the past two days...we'll see what tomorrow brings.

At any rate - Be safe out there.  Stay inside and off the roads until the plows get a chance to catch up.  Please make this a safe and Blessed Christmas for you and your familiy.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Was White After All...

Am I getting old or what?   Here we were plugging along, being spoiled with warmer than normal days - Georgie even cut Spinach from underneath her row cover in the north yard garden a couple days before Christmas!  We were feeling pretty smug about it all...even been putting off mounting the plow to the truck this fall/winter, I mean - why bother, right?

Ha!  Of course it snowed - it was Christmas yesterday after all!  I only remember one Christmas in NW Iowa when there was no snow, and that was in the mid 1950's!  I remember fussing about how was Santa going to get around - guess I should have looked at the bigger picture...hey he had to deliver to the southern hemisphere too - DUH!  Shouldn't be too hard switching sleigh runners to wheels right?

 But ya, reality raised its head and there we were...spending the last day of no snow and decent temps getting ready for a Blizzard Warning the next day...not a lot of snow, maybe 5"?  Hard to tell when its horizontal.  Pretty good winds...a basic white-out for nearly 10 hours.  Yup, sure looked like Christmas...should be a lot of happy kids anyway!  Us old grumps will just have to enjoy the view - it is pretty😊

Just a week ago we were all excited checking out the "Great Conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn in the SW sky.  For a good 10 days I thought we were doomed to cloud cover each evening, but two days before the event we got lucky and had a good look...it was kind of cool seeing both Jupiter and Saturn in the camera lens together...were able to see 4 of Jupiter's moons also but not any of Saturn's (Its just a camera lens after all).  The next night we were clouded in again and it seemed maybe the best day - the 21st - might be lost as well.

But we got lucky!  It was pretty windy the evening of the 21st but I did the best I could with the camera/lens...could see just 3 of Jupiter's moons...Callisto was too far out and too dim this time but Saturn was now very close in view with Jupiter.  I tried taking some normal scenes with the two in the background but they just weren't shots I was happy with.  This had plenty of hype for a few weeks before but really (not to rain on parades or the "emotional" event some portrayed) I remember plenty of single planet observations of Jupiter by itself - closer in its orbit to Earth, and Venus - especially last summer(!); that were much brighter than this conjunction...but it really was cool to see both planets so close by one another in the night sky!

And now we're hearing rumbles of another snow system coming in about 3 days.  But its now winter and we'll just settle in to the rhythm of the season; at least the days are now getting longer - that's a positive!

I'm looking forward to a better year ahead...and I know of a few Billion people thinking the same thing...at least we had a White Christmas here and didn't miss out!   

Have a Happy and Blessed New Year, and be kind to one another!