Back Yard Equinox

Posted on September 22, 2026 by admin

A solar lamp in our back yard.

I went around the yard taking pictures just ahead of sunset today, around the time of the fall equinox. The solar lamp translates energy from the sun into light, so in a real physical sense, this is sunlight by other means. At least for a while. It peters out after a few hours.

There’s an even deeper connection to stars, if not the sun. The lamp is partly iron. As one nonfiction book I read years ago put it – and I can’t remember where I read this – bits of iron are “shards of ancient suns.”

Another lamp, this one of the insect-theme variety.

The air has already decided that fall is underway, cool but not quite chilly. Still, you know chill isn’t long in coming. With a few more warm days sprinkled in, I hope.

Golden rod, which hangs out with the wrong crowd – pollen-heavy ragweed – and so is blamed for seasonal sneezing and other respiratory upsets afflicting us primates.

Other flowers.

Zinnias, as it happens – hardy September flowers doing well near the fence.

The Jantar Mantar of Jaipur

Posted on April 22, 2025 by admin

Apparently Sawai Jai Singh II (d. 1743), Raja of Amber and founder and Raja of Jaipur, had a keen interest in astronomy, because he commissioned the construction of six naked-eye observatories — jantar mantars – in his realm in the early 18th century. The one in Jaipur itself is a complex of structures hard to understand without explanation. Or even with explanation a lot of the time.

I didn’t take that picture, since that vantage was unavailable, or at least I didn’t know about it. Someone calling himself Knowledge Seeker thoughtfully released the image into the public domain, however. It gives a sense of the layout of instruments in a sort of plaza, though it doesn’t depict the large sundial, except right at the lower left corner. Just behind the Jantar Mantar is City Palace, more about which eventually, but which Jai Singh II also had built. One of those busy kings, sounds like.

“The Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur constitutes the most significant and best preserved set of fixed monumental instruments built in India in the first half of the 18th century; some of them are the largest ever built in their categories,” UNESCO says, for indeed it is a World Heritage Site, which are thick on the ground in India. “Designed for the observation of astronomical positions with the naked eye, they embody several architectural and instrumental innovations.”

This is the kind of place that reminds me once again how little I know. Such as about Indian astronomy, thousands of years in the making. A familiarity with that subject might help answer the question I have – why didn’t Jai Singh II incorporate places for telescopes? I feel certain he would have had some, imported or locally made.

The Jantar Mantar is also good for some gee-whiz moments, such as looking up at the world’s largest sundial.

Our affable guide in Jaipar that day, Ali, points to the time on the enormous dial plate. The instrument is capable of measuring time to an accuracy of two seconds (with some caveats; see “How accurate is it?” on this page).

He asserted that the sundial is indeed the world’s largest, though I’ve seen other sources that weasel with such phrasing as “one of.” I’ll go with Ali on this one: the largest in the world, unless I find out about a bigger one, and I’m not going to look very hard.

Ali also told us that his father was a tour guide in Jaipur, as was his father before him, which is some span, since he might have been close to my age. He was knowledgeable enough that being in the family biz seemed likely. He also might have had information about the use of telescopes back then, but I forgot to ask.

Other instruments, whose descriptions I read on English signs next to the Hindi, but which are less easy to understand than a sundial, except to say they are useful for tracking objects in the sky.

More structures, either built upward or downward.

Of course each instrument has a purpose and a name – such as Samrat Yantra, Jaya Prakasa, and Rama Yantra, which supposedly Jai Singh II designed himself. Detailed information is at jantarmantar.org. Even without a tight grip on all the details, there’s no doubt that the Jantar Mantar of Jaipur is impressive, besides having an impressive name that rolls right off your tongue.

Ozark Plateau & Dallas Figure Eight Road Trip & Total Solar Eclipse Extravaganza

Posted on April 17, 2024 by admin

The April 8, 2024 North American solar eclipse is already old news. It was practically so the minute it was over, a news cycle balloon whose air didn’t just leak out, but popped. A thousand articles bloomed in the days ahead of the event, mostly trotting out the same information: an elementary-school level explanation of solar eclipses, dire warnings about the dire consequences of staring into the Sun, maybe a note about festivals, quaint towns and surge motel pricing in the path of totality as people gathered in cities and towns in that narrow band.

Yuriko and I headed south to Dallas to see totality, making a two-night, three-day drive of it beginning on April 5; stayed five nights in Dallas; and then made a three-night, four-day return drive, arriving home yesterday. All together we drove 2,496 miles, generally crossing the Ozark Plateau in a course that made a (badly crumbled) figure 8 on a string.

After checking into a limited-service hospitality property in the old lead mining hills of southeastern Missouri on (Friday) April 5 – T-minus three days ahead of totality on Monday – I asked the clerk if they were booked up on Sunday, the day before.

“We’re booked up all weekend,” she said.

“At high prices?”

“Some places are getting $300 or $400 a night,” she said, not willing to admit (you never know who’s listening) that the same was true at her property, a franchisee of a multinational hospitality company that surely knows a thing or two about surge pricing.

I had a similar conversation with the desk clerk in 2017, ahead of the solar eclipse that year. I’d booked a room months earlier then – and this time too – to avoid surge pricing. Eclipses can be predicted at least 1,000 years into the future, and more importantly for ordinary folk, that information is readily available in our time. So it’s easy enough to avoid motel gouging. The next night, April 6, we were in a different motel, also (probably) a creature of surge pricing, also booked early.

As for the night before the eclipse, April 7, we avoided paying for a place to stay by relying on the good offices of my brother Jay, whom we stayed with. It just so happened that the path of totality passed over Dallas, a fact not lost on me some years ago. So I planned to be there at that time, and we were fortunate enough that all went according to plan.

We’ll never be able to do that exactly again, either, since the next time Dallas – or the place where Dallas is – will be in the the path of totality is 2317.

Totality was in the early afternoon. I considered it my lunch hour, since I was working that day. The skies over Dallas that morning were uncooperatively cloudy most of the morning, but by noon the Sun peeked out sometimes. Jay and Yuriko and I joined my nephew Sam and his family and, after a quick Torchy’s takeout lunch – and a zoom interview for me – we went to the nearby Lakeland Hills Park, at 32°48’14.1″N 96°41’47.5″W, according to Google Maps.

To add to the entertainment, Sam shot off a rocket. The idea had originally been to do so during totality, but he correctly decided that would be a distraction from the main event, so he shot it off early. Twice. Small children, including his children, chased it as it parachuted to the ground the first time. The second time, the parachute failed and that was the end of the rocket’s useful life. Naturally I was reminded of the rockets we shot off in ’75.

The orange crescent Sun was visible on and off as the Moon ate further into it. People were watching.

No need to see the partial eclipse via pin-hole when the Sun happened to be out.

We assessed the nearby clouds for size and what direction they seemed to be moving. The odds didn’t look that great for an unobscured view. Darkness began closing in anyway.

Totality came, just as the astronomers said it would. Luck was with us, mostly. We saw the blackened disk of the Sun and much of its close-in corona, as apt a name as any in astronomy, though little of the corona’s tendrils that so memorably stretched into the void in the clear skies of ’17. Still, quite the sight in ’24. Even saw a few solar prominences, gold-red-orange light blips at the edge of the disk, which I’m not sure I did last time. So was the partly cloudy totality worth driving more than 1,000 miles to see? Yes. Double yes.

Early Equinox

Posted on March 19, 2024 by admin

Our downstairs calendar is astronomy themed, obtained from my Secret Santa at work during the holidays. The year before, I’d asked for postcards, and got some packs of them. I decided an astronomy calendar would be the thing last Christmas, so that is what I asked for.

It’s called Astronomy with Phil Harrington, published by Willow Creek Press. Harrington seems to be something of a cottage industry when it comes to popular astronomy works. As for Willow Creek, it publishes scads of calendars, from Abstract Art 2024 to Zoo in a Box. Good for them. My calendar suggestions for 2025: Great Elevators of Europe, Vintage American Bottle Caps, and Classic TV Shows That Lasted A Season Or Less.

It’s a fine calendar, chock-a-block with information, and excellent images of celestial sights. For March, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, said to capture roughly 10,000 galaxies, an imponderable number of places and yet a vanishingly tiny fraction of them all. For April: a photo of the total eclipse of 2017, for obvious reasons.

I look at the calendar often. I looked at it this morning and learned that today is the vernal equinox, at 10:06 p.m. Central Daylight Time, when the sun appears straight above the equator, headed (so to speak) northward. Not, I think, the “first day of spring.” Not around here anyway. For the last week, the chill we didn’t get much in February has slipped into March.

I’d have thought the equinox would be on the 20th or 21st, and I suppose by Coordinated Universal Time it is on the 20th, but the time I care about is CDT. Turns out the vernal equinox is earlier than usual this year, due to the leap year and other factors too complicated for me to relate.

As if to mark the vernal equinox – though I’m sure it’s a coincidence – a tree service hired by the village came by today to trim the trees along the street. Those in the “parkway,” that is, the land between the street and the lot lines, and thus belonging to the village. Public trees.

After the trimming, which I was too busy to document, came a wood chipper. I was ready for that.

I noticed that the machine is a Morbark brand. (Not Mo’BetterBark.) I had to look that up. Turns out the village is supporting Michigan manufacturing by having one.

“The year was 1957 when Norval Morey, a local sawmill operator, took the first risky step into manufacturing armed with a patent for a portable pulp wood debarker,” the company web site says. “The Morbark Debarker Company was born that year, and nobody in Winn, Michigan, could have predicted the growth that the company would experience over the next five decades.”

Fearsome machines, those wood chippers. The kind of death maw that a villain dangles James Bond over, only to fall in himself when 007 inevitably makes his escape from the trap.

The Bond bon mot at that moment (Roger Moore, I picture it): “Bet that chap has a grinding headache.”

Heron Creek Forest Preserve

Posted on March 1, 2023 by admin

At about 7:05 Central this evening, we were out walking the dog in cool, but not cold temps, with a cloudy haze covering most of the sky. As we headed west on a neighborhood street, I noticed two lights next to each other, just poking through the haze not far above the trees. For a moment, I though it must be an airplane. But it didn’t appear to move.

Then the clouds cleared just a little and I realized the lights were Venus and Jupiter. I remembered all at once something I’d read and then forgotten — that they were supposed to be in conjunction soon. As in, today.

They came and went from behind the clouds for a few minutes. When I got home, I stayed outside and watched from the front yard. One of our neighbors came out to walk his dog, and I pointed it out to him.

“Cool,” he said. I agree.

About a mile north of the town of Long Grove’s shopping district is Heron Creek Forest Preserve, a unit of the Lake County Forest Preserve District.

There was still enough afternoon warmth left on Sunday to take a mile-and-a-half looping walk through the preserve, which at 242 acres, isn’t that large. Some parts of the gravel trails were muddy, marked with rims of dirty slush.

For us, that mostly affected our shoes. For the dog, who lives closer to the ground, that eventually meant a bath. But we all enjoyed the walk through the pre-spring vegetation.

The diminutive Heron Creek.

As far as I can tell consulting maps, this little creek begins at a small lake not far west of the forest preserve, and heads east till it joins Indian Creek, which is a tributary of the Des Plaines River. Heron Creek’s course is entirely north of the aforementioned Buffalo Creek.

Also cool. Just not as epic as two worlds appearing close to collision.

Jet Transits the Moon

Posted on January 27, 2021 by admin

Space.com’s 2021 Full Moon Calendar: “This month’s full moon occurs on Thursday, Jan. 28 at 2:16 p.m. EDT (19:16 UTC), but the moon will appear full the night before and after its peak to the casual stargazer. January’s full moon is known as the Wolf Moon, though it has many other nicknames by different cultures.”

Just after 5 p.m. today, now a little before dark, I needed to go out to move groceries from one of our cars into the house. Though not subzero, the post-snow freeze felt pretty cold, maybe because I’d been inside all day.

Sure enough, the moon looked full, not far above the horizon to the east. As I stood outside my garage, I noticed a distant airplane flying (apparently) near the visible full moon. Then I saw it transit the full moon for a split second. Though looking small as a gnat, the outline of the plane was clear, backed by the pale moonlight.

I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen that before. Now I have. Right place, right time.

Winter ’20

Posted on December 2, 2020 by admin

Winter starts on December 1, as far as I’m concerned. Some past years, that day has obliged us with snow cover, or least snow flurries, such as in 2006 and 2008 and 2010.

Not this year. I had to be out early in the morning to be somewhere, but it was merely dry and below freezing.

Or maybe winter started the night about a week before Thanksgiving when I was out ’round midnight and spotted Orion riding high in the sky, trailed by the loyal Canis Major.

After I got home yesterday, I had a lot to do, and so didn’t spent much more time out in the early winter temps, or even thinking about them. Early in the evening, I looked up the local temperature. About as cold as I thought: 28.

Then I had a moment of idle curiosity. The Internet was made for just such moments, so I looked up what I wanted to know: how cold it was at that moment in Anchorage, Alaska: 37.

Not as cold as I thought. The kind of thing TV weather presenters occasionally yak about, though usually in January: Look, it’s colder in Illinois than Alaska! But according to the respective 10-day forecasts, it will soon be single-digits in Anchorage, but not here.

Thursday Dribs & Drabs

Posted on August 13, 2020 by admin

Over the years in mid-August I’ve sometimes spent time in the back yard after midnight, looking up for the Perseids. Not a lot of time, since my sleep habits are fairly regular, and the washed out suburban skies aren’t the best for any kind of observation. So usually I don’t see much.

Just after midnight today, Thursday — about a day after peak — I saw one bright meteor whiz by Cassiopeia. Nice.

A recent Zoom.

Two in Washington state, two in Tennessee, and one in Illinois. There’s another social Zoom tomorrow night for me, involving an entirely different group: besides two in Illinois this time, there will be three in Georgia, including some people I haven’t seen in about 20 years.

I’m using a free Zoom membership, which specifies only 40 minutes per meeting. Yet so far there has been no time limit for me. I figure that’s like the old dope peddler giving out free samples for a little while.

The Perseids and dope, at least one kind of it, bring to mind “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s a lovely song and a paean to the Colorado Rockies, which certainly deserve one. I understand that watching the Perseids while up in the mountains was part of John Denver’s inspiration for the song.

Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky

Then of course, there are these lines:

Friends around the campfire
And everybody’s high

Denver denied he was singing about anything as crass as chemical enhancement under a sublime firmament. Those friends were just high on nature! But I believe he was bending to popular prejudice at the time, saying what he felt he had to say.

One other thing about the song, its least likable aspect. Early in the song, a young man comes to the mountains: He was born in the summer of his 27th year. I’ll take him as a stand-in for Denver. That’s fine. Discovering new places that touch your soul counts as a good thing. Later, however, the song bemoans people moving to the area: more people, more scars upon the land.

I’ll give Denver the benefit of the doubt when it comes to conservationism. I’m sure he was genuinely concerned about the state of the environment, especially the mountains he loved. Yet the song pretty clearly contains the following sentiment, even if unconsciously on Denver’s part: it’s OK for me to be here, but not you.

Summer Sky ’19

Posted on August 14, 2019 by admin

No chance of seeing the Perseids this year from northern Illinois: overcast skies for the last few days. Not that seeing the light streaks is that impressive here in the light-washed suburbs, anyway.

But some days, the summer sky at dusk makes up for all that. Such as a few weeks ago.

Not all the glory of seeing with your eyes, but some of it. The glow was exceptionally ephemeral. I walked outside and noticed the color. I happened to have a camera in my pocket. About five minutes later, after I finished my outside business — taking out the trash — the glow was almost gone.

Snowy MLK Weekend

Posted on January 22, 2019 by admin

The weather’s been strangely accommodating so far this month. Ten days ago, snowfall held off till Saturday afternoon. This is what it looked like in Chicago, as Ann and I went to lunch after Titus Andronicus.
At Mr. J’s Dawg ‘n Burger. Glad it’s still there.

Last Friday, heavy snow started to fall well after rush hour, which was a few hours later than forecast. After finishing work in the late afternoon, I went to a grocery store. The place was jammed. We all could have gone a few hours later and still avoided driving in the snow.

By Saturday morning, about a foot of snow covered the ground. Spent a fair amount of that morning removing snow from the my driveway and sidewalks, but not so enthusiastically that I found myself in a hospital or worse. At least the snow was light, unlike the heavy stuff in November.

On Sunday, the high was 14 degrees F., the low 4, and the previous day’s clouds had cleared off. Here we are in the pit of winter. This encouraged us to stay home.

As I was taking out the trash in the evening, I looked up at the full moon and noticed that part of it was missing. A shadow had taken a bite. Then I remember the expected total lunar eclipse, which I’d forgotten.

A little later, at about 10:50 pm, we all went out in the single-digit temps to see totality: a pretty penny in the sky. Lunar eclipses are better in the summer, but they are when they are. Less than a minute outside looking at it was enough.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: astronomy