Moon Me, Baby

I've mentioned my astronomy hobby before, and that I occasionally will take moon and sun photos. Here are a few I took of the moon just using a basic camera with no fancy preparation or set-up. As you can see from the dates on the photo labels, the first one was taken in January 2006, while the other three were taken in September 2007; the latter were all taken on the same night.

It's hard to get a good moon photo without using a tripod, because the slightest hand shake will result in a blurry moon; these particular shots out of many taken on those two nights came out okay though.

This first one you may need to biggify in order to see the clouds above and beneath the moon (it's hard to tell in post-mode how well the small post photo will come out!):

These next 3 you can see the clouds better, but you still might want to bigify to see the detail a bit more:

I hope you found these somewhat interesting!

Texas October Sunset

Texas sunsets don't quite compare to Hawaii sunsets, but they're each pretty in their own way, I think. We've had a lot of rain and clouds around here this fall which have meant there haven't been too many sunsets to see, but every once in awhile, the sun and the clouds work together to produce something pretty (if not quite as stunning as a Hawaiian sunset), and occasionally I even get to see it and if I'm lucky, I'm in the right spot with a camera to take a few photos. Here's a few from this last week:

I love wispy clouds within a sunset. I used to do stained glass as a hobby, and some of the most beautiful glass I worked with had this same wispy look to the patterns.

Does anyone know if this cloud pattern I noted with the arrow has any official name? I always think of those as "footprint clouds" because there are usually 5 to 7 rows of equal length/width clouds with space in between and it reminds me of tread from a shoe.

More pretty wispy clouds...

A bit more of the sunset...and um those darn towers...

Deeper into the sunset, not much left of it. And look at the pretty crescent Moon! Not a bad shot for a simple point-and-shoot camera on auto settings, if I do say so myself.

Coming up later in the week, I'll have some lovely Hawaiian tropical flowers to share. I'm not done with Hawaii yet, oh no, just thought I'd throw in something else this time...