No moon for us

05/05/12, 4 pm, looking northwest

Although the day dawned clear, the clouds gathered until the afternoon was completely overcast. We, in Central Virginia, missed the big full moon. It was there but we couldn't see it. Warmer than usual weather continues with a high in the mid-80's and a low about 20 degrees below that. We are still about 10 degrees warmer than average. We ended the day with some drizzles of rain. And, no big moon.

Mooning

02/09/12, 9:45 pm, looking east

The season of Valentine's Day and love made me think of the word "mooning" and not the kind that involves dropping one's pants. Here's a definition of mooning from the Free Dictionary as related to love:

to yearn or pine as if infatuated

And, I just looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, and it is exactly the same. That sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary (1970 reissue) which has six pages of moon-related words including moonblind, moonish, moonlighty, and moony. There is a set of moon-word meanings that play on this definition:

Inclined to moon or act in a listless, aimless manner; given to mooning; stupidly dreamy

In other words, moonstruck, or affected by a mental obsession, or injured by sleeping in the moon's rays. I was moonstruck by this view of Mars and the just-past-full moon draped with a gauzy cloud and a prism of color. 

Misty full moon

02/08/12, 4:15 am, looking west

The February full moon is called the Snow Moon and that is a bit out of sync with the climate in the US this year. The snow coverage today in the US is heaviest in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains at more than two feet, and northern New England and New York with only 4-8 inches. Although 1-3 inches of snow is predicted northwest of Richmond today, we have only a light rain falling. It feels very unwinterly.


La Niña seems to be making the north wetter this winter, record snowfall in Washington and Colorado, and the south dryer, with drought in Texas and Florida. All these weather predictions seem to overlook the mid-Atlantic region. Maybe that means we'll have an ordinary winter, whatever that means.

Moon and cirrus clouds

01/10/12, about 8 pm, looking east

This is the full moon on Tuesday, January 10th at about 8 pm still rising above the trees in the east. The sky was covered with wispy cirrus clouds and as the moon emerged they began to glow with silvery moonlight.


January's full moon was called the Full Wolf Moon by native American Indians. From the Farmer's Almanac is the description of why it was so named:

Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule.

This moon painting is somewhat wolfish--reminds me of the fur of a gray wolf.


These cirrus clouds are the harbinger of wet weather forecast for tomorrow.

Full moon

Yesterday morning at 5:30 am the queenly full moon ruled the western sky attended by clouds in waiting. This watercolor reminds me of another figure from English romanticism, William Blake. Blake was a triple talent, poet, painter and printmaker. He was one of those people who labored creatively in obscurity and was considered an eccentric at best by his contemporaries.  At worst, Blake was thought a madman.


Blake lived a bit earlier than John Constable and I can't imagine they would have had much to say to one another despite mutual interest in art. Blake's religious intensity and interest in classical art and writing would have contrasted strongly with Constable's grounded naturalism based in the landscape around the River Stour.


However, they both rejected the prevalent English painting style taught at the Royal Academy: the neoclassic and generic beauty proscribed by Sir Joshua Reynolds. That was a snare that they both escaped.