SLOweather

This is a large image (1069 x 731) so I’m posting a link to it, rather than embedding it in the post. Reducing it in size would destroy the detail and beauty of it. The thunderhead/anvil cloud and its shadow are spectacular.

Cloudscape

There are 4 definitions of Black Moon in Wikipedia:

1. the absence of a new moon or dark moon in a calendar month;

2. the absence of a full moon in a calendar month;

3. either the third or the fourth new moon or dark moon in a season that has four of them (a season normally has only three). This is in analogy to the term blue moon which is the third full moon in a season that has four;

4. the second occurrence of a dark moon or new moon in a calendar month; this in analogy to an improper use of the term blue moon which sometimes is applied to the second full moon in a calendar month.

Today is a black moon in the third meaning, with the third new moon of summer 2006 on August 23 (2:10 PM PDT) and the fourth one falling on September 22 (4:45 AM PDT). The first day of fall occurs on September 22 (9:03 PM PDT, if I did the calculation correctly).

One of the neighborhood bobcats was out foraging for a little breakfast this morning:

A Stellar’s jay visiting our backyard feeder:

Sunflower planted from fallen birdseed by a squirrel in a rosa californica pot:

“Stopping Time” California grape tendril on the hands of a terra cotta hummingbird clock:

Sometime Monday, 14 August, 2006 SLOweather will clock it’s millionth page load in just over 5 years. That’s pretty cool!

We’ve been geocaching for a while, now. It ’s something fun and different to do sometimes on our weekly Date Day. I posted here a while back about placing our Teddy’s Bridge geocache.

I received an email about the Jeep 4×4 Travel Bugs and sent for one, and we received Jeep 4×4 travel bug JPFV0Q in the mail on August 8th, 2006.

Today, we hiked up to Teddy’s Bridge, checked the cache, and placed the travel bug in it. It’s going to be interestng to see who finds it and where it goes.

Tonight the sun sets locally at 8PM, and the full moon for August rises at 8:34 PM. It was at it’s fullest at 3:54 AM this morning PDT.

The Native Americans called it the Full Sturgeon Moon , since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes called it the Full Red Moon because, as it rose, it appeared reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

The Celts called is variously the Full Barley Moon, or Full Hazel Moon.

Based on the temperatures today, I think I’m going to go with Red Moon. Last night’s 99% moon was a pretty orange as it rose over the airport, as seen from the SLOweather digs. Seeing the fields at the Avila Valley Barn last weekend, I bet they’d lobby for the Green Corn Moon.

I just received this from the NWS in Oxnard:

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For your information we have stopped the bad data flow. Unfortunately the person that works on this is out of the office for 2 weeks so will be awhile till it can be worked on. Sorry for the inconvenience.