Earthset via Artemis II

An Earthset, captured by the Artemis II crew from the Orion Integrity spacecraft during Monday’s flyby. Photo credit-NASA

Credit...I am deeply, powerfully moved by this image, shared from the crew of Artemis II just before they lost  communications while passing around the Moon's dark side. Earth Day came a little early this year.

The crew members observed a solar eclipse as they emerged from the other side of the moon.Credit...NASA

This solar eclipse picture is almost too much to comprehend really. That's the Moon blocking out the Sun in a way that we never get to experience on Earth. And yes, they still had to wear their cardboard eclipse glasses!

But to me, even more important, is what one of the astronauts said in their first words sent back to Houston Control when they regained communications with Houston Control:

 "We will always choose Earth," Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, said once the crew members regained communications. "We will always choose each other."

Could there be a greater, more cosmically measured distance between those beautiful, inspiring words of humanity than those offered up almost simultaneously by our deranged madman president threatening that "a whole civilization will die tonight"? Here's hoping...and all prayers and good thoughts offered up that the Earth that the Artemis II crew eventually returns to does not include the aftermath of such a catastrophic event.

Super Worm Moon

 The full moon last night was especially beautiful. And it was a Super Moon, as well as being the Worm Moon. I like the automatic night settings on my iPhone, this almost looks like a daylight picture!

And an update: How a Supermoon Helped Free the Giant Container Ship From the Suez Canal

Stronger tidal effect made it easier to partially float the Ever Given but also gave engineers a hard deadline

Ah-hah! Super Moon to the rescue.

Moon-Day

Happy Moon-Day
This is how she looked last month , being cradled by our trees.

Full Moon Caught

Sometimes you are lucky enough to catch the full moon in the right place at the right time.
(Like when you happen to have your camera with you.)

Super Moon

 All of a sudden May is over! I swear I feel like I live near a time vortex or something. I get sucked in, pop back out and month has gone past.  So, back to the here and now, and looking backwards through the pictures I took last month to share here...  So how about two pictures from the Super Moon earlier this month?

It really was super, and worth staying up late to take a picture of it.

Anniversary On The Elation

We just got back from a really special vacation to celebrate being married for 20 years (gasp! Wow!). This was our ship, The Elation which sailed out of San Diego and took us down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and back again.

It was our first time going on a cruise or even on such a large ship. I was really fascinated with the wake as we moved through the water and took many many pictures of it. All those swirls and curves and colors.

Here we are as we leave San Diego. My husband, Marc was already there for a work conference so he was really glad to be going on vacation.

Our state room had a window, which kept surprising me. Because the room was just a smallish hotel room, but then you'd look out the window, and wow, you're at sea!

Every night we'd come back to our room after stuffing ourselves at another wonderful dinner to a different towel animal. This one was hanging from the light fixture and wearing my sunglasses. Kinda freaky. They had a class on how to do the towel folding and a book you could buy too, but I wasn't into learning this skill I guess.

This was a sign that just cracked me up. I know it was an international ship with an international crew, so it probably doesn't mean what it says, but still, good advice to remember!

I loved the nautical flags above the main deck. One of the days at sea was super windy and these flags were impossible to photograph, they were moving so much.

The stairways and elevators had these panels with these funny faces. Sometimes the eyes seemed to follow you.

And here's the carpet pattern which echoed the panels above and the staircase railings (the squiggly bit), reminds me of squids.

After a couple of days we arrived in Cabo San Lucas. We were up early to go on an excursion, so I took this 7am shot as we pulled in near the shore. I love how the seagull ended up in this picture (it was a surprise!).We went out on a whale watching trip in a Zodiac motorboat. Oh boy was it ever a blast! Like a two hour long really speedy, roller coaster ride.

Yes it was windy, check out my crazy hair. We saw three humpback whales, one of which breached right next to our boat. We also heard it singing which was super cool! And there was a big pod of dolphins and of course a whole lot of vast, empty, endless ocean.

We then ambled into the town of Cabo. You know you are in a foreign country when the stop sign says: "ALTO". Here are some luchadores masks hanging up for sale. I almost bought some for our sons, but talked myself out of it, turns out they would have worn them as costumes in their band (like Los Straitjackets). There were a whole lot of touristy and rude tshirts for sale. But this one really made me laugh.And to end the fun, we woke up very early to this sight out our window as the ship pulled back into the San Diego harbor. The moon setting on the horizon. Yes it is orange. Not sure why it was orange (pollution? Sea haze?), but that is the color that our eyes saw, not a trick of the camera or software.

Thanks for letting me bore you with my vacation pictures! :-)

Finally, A New Year

Hey Hey! Happy New Year!

Here is how we look now, my family and I. See how short I look now? Funny how things change in just a few years isn't it? My husband said he tilted his head so that you couldn't tell that our oldest is now actually taller than him, pretty sneaky, huh? This is the picture we're using as our card this year, which I suppose I shall be sending out as a New Year's greeting card now.

Did you chose your word for the new year yet? I like to do it at random, putting the slips of paper into a bowl and chosing one. Last year's word was "Blessedness" and this year's word is Physicality. Well that will be an interesting emphasis and change for me. Hmmmm, wonder how that will affect my art making?

Here is a shot of last night's beautiful Full Blue Moon. It had an enormous ring (or is it a nimbus) which I wasn't able to capture.And here it is fooled with so that it actually looks blue.

December's Moon

Continuing my quest for a great full moon shot. I really like the rainbow effect from the cloud cover. It sure was bright last month. This month I'll have to arrange to be somewhere other than by on my driveway, those trees get in the way.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art we recently saw some of the earliest pictures ever made, some of which were taken through telescopes. The ones of the moon were amazing, and I thought how that must have been to see a picture of the surface of the moon back in 1870. Without our first hand knowledge of what that heavenly body was really like. It seems so commonplace now doesn't it? We can't do that really, can we? Because we've seen with our own human eyes those moon rocks in the Smithsonian, and the astronauts have seen and told us about the thick moon dust, we have those photographs of the epic footprints that remain, and of course the left-behind flags and other space travel debris that litter the surface of our satellite.

Once you've (not personally but as the collective humankind), gone someplace, then it isn't ever the same mystery is it?

November's Full Moon

I was moonstruck this last week, the full moon's pull was powerful and strong. After many unsuccessful attempts, I finally figured out some of the settings on the manual setting of my digital camera and got this photo. Without a tripod I will note in a very braggadocious sort of annoying way. See, I can hold still for two seconds (which is how long the shutter was open!).
Anyways, hope you enjoy this photo as much as I do!November's Full Moon is known as:
Full "Beaver" or "Snow" Moon (from the beavers busy building their winter homes).
Also, Full Frost Moon.
In China called The White Moon
In Cherokee The Trading Moon
In Choctaw The Sassafrass Moon
In Sioux Moon When Horns Are Broken Off
In Celtic The Dark Moon
In New Guinea Tiger Shark Moon


No frost, beavers or snow around here, it was about 80F on the day of the full moon this year.
But usually we're having frost by then. Not this year though.

What a weird coincidence, I googled "November Full Moon Name" to get some of the above info, and one of the first hits is my local library system! No wonder I love living here...

Trimming the Moon

Bought this Fiskars rotary trimmer at Costco about a month ago, and finally got around to using it. After a little fiddling (duh, there is a lock for the sliding cutter), I got the hang of it and trimmed up the collaborative Halloween storyline deck (artwork similar to this deck shown but with a spooky story card too) in virtually no time at all. This was the first time I attempted to trim my cards with anything but scissors, and I was much happier with the results. Not as wonky or iffy around the edges.
The surface is smooth and slick, the measuring markings are clear, and the cutter moves easily. The little feet on the bottom held the whole shebang in place really sturdily on my table too. It came with an extra blade too, I don't know how long the blade will last on this gizmo.

But after trimming this deck, I was again disheartened by how completely off a lot of the measurements are in these collaborative decks. They are supposed to be 3x5". Seems pretty clear huh? But only about half of them actually were. Most of the errors were pretty close and I didn't lose too much of the image or the words. But some were off by quite a bit. I hope that the future decks tighten up on this. Especially for the useable decks like the tarot one!

Now to trim the two copies of the recent tarot Carnivale Mystere collaboration. That's a lot of cutting to do!

I was recently struck by the view of the half moon and the cloudy sky/silhoutte of my house and trees. So I'm sharing here my two best pictures which kind of captured what I saw.