Crow moon

Because we had gotten a pretty nice set of full moon photos Friday night, because it was sooooo cold outside, I decided it'd be silly to go outside again just because the moon was 'actually' full. How much difference could there be in the photos, right? We settled down to watch a video although I kept one eye on the moon as it came up through the firs.

On an impulse, since I've been doing that sketch a day thing, and because I had told Parapluie that it didn't make much sense to draw this particular moon because anybody could make a moon bigger anytime, I got out my ink pens (by now it's Sharpie fine and medium) and began to draw it as it came up through the firs.


Watching it rise like that was a mistake. When I saw it in all its awesomeness (favorite Jack Black word from the kid movie, Kung Fun Panda which we weren't watching mainly because we loaned it to our grandsons), I knew we (note the we part) had to go out again.

We had left the camera on the tripod. Farm Boss took a series of photos of which I liked three best. If you enlarge the first and last ones, you can see the craters. We were by then using the largest telephoto.


The sky was very clear last night with a few clouds drifting around but the stars and moon were sharp. Every time I am out in the night like that, when I actually can see so many stars, so clear and sharp, I think I should learn their names. I never have but it's not too late. When Farm Boss and I were first dating, we'd go out to a big farm where he worked and we'd lie in the grass and look up at the stars and he knew some of their names, the constellations. I was impressed. He still knows them and I still don't.

I only know a couple of the planets when I see them and regularly determine that I will change that and learn the names of at least the closest stars to us and which stars make up which constellations. I've bought several books with that intention in mind. Except you know the sky moves around... Actually we do but anyway the end result complicates it as I can't just learn one sky pattern. I have to learn it for different seasons. Right then and there it gets into the too much information category.

If we got a hot tub again maybe I would spend more time learning which one is which as this time we want to get it to be out in the open, not under the oak trees. (that was such a mistake when the raindrops fell off the limbs right onto us, not like a gentle rain at all but like a plop plop plop and there's way too much rain in the Pacific Northwest to not take that into account in positioning a hot tub).


Back to the subject, this is the moon the Farmer's Almanac calls the Worm moon because the worms are beginning to come up and make tracks on the ground. Also known as the Lenten moon to Christians. Or the Sap moon to those who tap maple trees for syrup. But I prefer one of the names the Native Americans used-- the Crow Moon when the cawing of the crows signaled the end of winter.