WOB plays "cupid" for "wingéd messenger"?

Last night:

And tonight:

That is the side of the condo on the left.

Rapid movement between Thursday and Friday. Won't push my Raven's feathers to get to tomorrow.

WOB

The Moon and the Raven

I first saw the Raven trying to eat the Sun on June 30, 1954. I had saved for a year to buy a roll of Ektachrome and then found I did not have enough money to pay for the developing. I did better in 1963 - July 20th at Moose River Crossing, north of Cochrane - 70 seconds before Raven got indigestion and spat out the sun, Aug 1999 was not good - 8/8 cloud cover from the ground up . boy was that dark and eerie.This was filmed in PAL - pitch black with the reaction of a class of grade XII students . very impressive.

The camera club suggested the challenge of photographing the moon and so I thought this series might be interesting. The first, the introduction, was The Moon and the Turtle.
Now I want to try for the New Moon. October 24, 2014.

The first gives the impression several of us had standing on the shore of Bass Lake above the town:

Not the best for astronomy but a colourful warm sunset. However by changing the exposure and using a mylar film right in front of the camera  I could  get a more astronomical result:

Note the sunspots,


By 2017 there were still a  few sunspots to be see. August 21 -

There were several different approaches:

Vicki and I were at Mikisew Provincial Park wheere I took these 3 shots:

The last 2 photos  give different "worldly points of view.

Cheers, Raven,

WOB

The Moon and the Turtle

Last week, I saw my first turtle of this Spring - actually my 1st and 2nd and a frog. So ready or not Spring will arrive whether our parks and countryside are open to us or not.

I recalled a scene from early May 2013:

Can you see the pattern on shells?

The Indigenous people saw this as a calendar:

with 13 moonths per year and 28 days per moonth or month. It is a far more logical calendar than our Roman inheritance of Julius and Augustus displacing the seventh to tenth calendar months to September to December., not to mention the irregular number of days per month.

This is a solar calendar. However, to understand how the Moon was used to inform the people of the coming seasons, one has to understand that there is a stellar version, called a sidereal version, as in sidereal day, month, and year based on a relationship with a direction in space toward stars. And a solar version where the Sun is used as the marker.

So the following shows the difference between a day, really a solar day from noon to noon, and a sidereal day, the time it takes for a star to cross the meridian from day to day.

Because the Earth is revolving around the sun, successive sunrises, or transits at noon require the Earth to rotate just a little bit more than 360°. However, if one were to observe when a star transits, crosses the meridian, its highest point in the sky, we would see that it occurs about 3min  56sec earlier every night - that is the stars each night appear to drift westward through the seasons. I am using civil/solar time, hours and minutes - sidereal time uses the same names but their sizes are slightly different!

This also is true for the Moon motion:

The Moon requires just 27 days to go around the Earth when its position is measured against the distant background of stars. It takes nearly 3 more days for the phase, say New Moon, to repeat. The turtle's shell almost manages, but not quite. However, the Roman/Julian calendar was off too, and there have been several reforms to try to "control" time.

Let me consider just one example, the Moon in Taurus, near the Pleiades  - Sun Feb 17, 2013:

 

Jupiter was the disc near the "Vee" of Taurus and then the appearance of the Moon seen from Earth, here as a half of a disc. One "Moonth" later, sidereal, the moon is against the same backdrop of stars but the phase has  changed:

recall, too, that in 2013 February only had 28 days, a good turtle!

In 2020, in the midst of Covid-19, self-isolation, and time for contemplation we can, perhaps, begin to appreciate another way of learning. The example is the 3,600 year old sky disc or Nebra shield of copper with gold inlay.

You can goggle this for more information. The main thing to take away is that there is a crescent Moon near the compact group of 7 gold dots taken to represent the Pleiades, the 7 daughters of Atlas, and in the Indigenous culture, Spider Woman. The Moon has this phase near the Pleiades in Spring, and could, and probably did serve as a reminder that planting may start, animals will be migrating and fish will be returning to streams to spawn. Spider Woman lowered the first humans to "Turtle Island" and this time can also be associated with "birth" and Spring, a renewal.

I shall pause here and continue later with an introduction to Raven and the Orillia Camera Club suggestion to photograph the Moon.

WOB

3 Birds to identify

Vicki and I saw this bird in the morning where we have in other years seen Killdeer:

Any comments?

OK, I think I can live with Killdeer even if the images are not so hot.

The next bird I observed along the shore of Lake Couchiching. I have the most photos of it, both against and with the sun. Also at the end in flight:

This "stretching" of the neck was repeated frequently over several minutes and I think was associated with feeding on flies that were quite numerous. I was wearing my Covid-19 mask to keep ,the flies out!

I was tracking the bird in flight so not as bad as it might have been.

Then a third bird flew back to the shoreline:

Might this last one also be a Killdeer?

If so what is the one in the middle? And if not what could it be?


WOB

They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.

For all our friends, some who know what snow is or was, for those sweltering away in +++ 20°sC since Feb here is what it has been "like in May"

None of this is mine . just my sentiments - WOB

Mothers' Day - Mothering Sunday

It is an emotional time for me, for us: we all have mothers. For many of us, our mothers are separated from us in time and space but not from our hearts and our souls. Some time ago, but with this in mind, I gathered my thoughts around Spring, my origin, My sequence starts on the Black River, maybe on, certainly near, indigenous land. The river is black but flows from white snow melt - something we should not forget when we look around at others - who also have mothers.

The red colour grows on the Dogwood

Vicki and I spent several visits here, so beautiful.

Now I am moving over to the north end of Lake Couchiching and into the woods for a moment.

There is a connection here:

Do you see it?

The Spring flowers are growing among the Autumn leaves - you cannot have one without the connection to the other. Is that observation worth a PhD? It is certainly worth life and might just sustain humans if we should ever learn about "sapiens" before we are Dodos.

WOB