Knock, knock knocking on heaven's

 Actually,

 it was also knocking on my computer!

Ja, to remove the bugs.

So he asked me what I did - I answered "astronomy, and you?" 

" I am an ornithologist"

 

 

 Me: Oh, really? Knock, knock!
Ornithologist: Who’s there?
Me: Woodpeckers.
Ornithologist: Woodpeckers who?
Me: No, that’s the owl. And you call yourself an ornithologist?

 

 

Now whoo is a wise old bird?

 

 

WOB

Who is the real wise old Bird?

 

Sometimes I stumble -

 Sometimes stars get in my eyes

 and my feathers

 get ruffled

 Sometimes  I get fooled by the colourful leaves -

 I think I actually was able to call this Cardinal over to me - wouldn't that be loverley!

 

So who is the wise ol' bird?

 WOB

I wonder if

 I recall my 1st solar eclipse - June 30, 1954.

And there have been some memorable one since - 1999 at a youth hostel and 25km of grid-lock afterwards.  And last year's panic in educational circles..

Friday morning there was a total lunar eclipse - and I have memories of a couple of them but no dates. One was so cold that film in my camera became brittle and tore . In another occasion I used a 15cm  refractor in the north dome at DDO to observe and time the eclipse of lunar craters by the Earth's shadow, I used a tape recorder with time signals as well as time the  observations. I wrote a computer program to calculate  the radius of the Earth's shadow based on the time of the passage of the  shadow over a crater - I had a list of some 20 craters and in some cases included times for the shadow tangent to the crater rim as well as for any central peak.I did this for ingress and egress. In a UofT computer course I had already written and debugged routines for interpolation of values from the ephemeris  ( Chebyshev and Lagrange polynomials)

Let us look at the initial   phase of the eclipse around Thursday midnight into Friday morning, March 14, 2025:

 The penumbral phase is difficult to see so the rest of the series is umbral-total.

 

It is clear that shadow has a round edge:

 Aristotle argued for a spherical Earth.  

Around this time, the idea of a flat earth was coming into question. The proof provided by Aristotle was a moon's eclipse. When the moon eclipses, the boundary is always convex.
So if the eclipses are due to the interposition of the earth, the shape must be caused by its circumference

One can also see that the Moon is moving relative to the background stars.

 

The Moon is moving left through the Earth's shadow. I have marked some stars for reference.

 

 It was a mild, -3°C, calm, night, maybe some cirrus. I had some obligations on Friday morning and so did not complete the series of photos necessary  to show the Moon pull away from the stars on the right, and also show the drift of the Earth's shadow with time. 

I think the ancients knew a lot about the motion of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars on the sky. However, it also gave some power to control others - perhaps little has changed?

 

WOB

 

Northern Hawk Owl

 It was several years ago that I saw my first and to date only Northern Hawk Owl.

 It was a daytime encounter.

And it lasted for weeks  - the owl was active and attentive during the day.

 

 

 

I wonder if it is the same one that has returned? 

WOB

Thoughts from the past

 Is Saturday night bath night?

 

 

Birds of a feather, I guess?

 

 So not all spiders are arachnids!

 

 But all the feathers?

 

 White-crowned Pigeon

 

 Reflecting?

 

 WOB

 Reality is a mirage!

 

 I guess this is March madness when one has cabin fever? 

Chill, baby, chill.