Earliest Sunset

Today's sunset in Hood River, at 4:21 pm, is the earliest sunset of the year. Actually, the sun sets at 4:21 each day from now until Dec 14, at which time it starts to set later and later.  Hooray!

This isn't quite the shortest day of the year, which occurs on the Winter Solstice (Dec 21, 2008).

And it certainly isn't the latest sunrise, which is 7:46 am from Dec 28 to Jan 8, at which point the sun starts rising earlier and earlier. Hooray again!

Sunrise and sunset times are dependent on latitude, so these times only apply to locations at Hood River's latitude of 45.7 North. For other locations, check this out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Not a whole lot happening on the HR weather scene lately. High pressure has been diverting storms north and south for the most part, and that will continue for the next week.

We did receive a little more rain (0.18") than expected from today's weak front. Another shot of precipitation might roll in on Thanksgiving, but after that... dry...

I've lived in Hood River 32 years now. For the earlier part of that time, it seemed like it would very often snow here on Thanksgiving. Not so much anymore. But I'm hoping that my saying this will shift the odds towards snow.

And from the "wow, I sure wish I'd seen that" category: Five days ago over Alberta, Canada, a desk-sized meteor plunged into Earth's atmosphere, captured on a police car dash cam:

They Knew...

Yet another post about the ongoing global financial meltdown. Sorry, but this stuff is really fascinating to me. But then, I would find an asteroid striking the Earth really fascinating too.

It's the popular consensus that the main (or at least initial) cause of this financial mess was the collapse of the housing bubble. Blame for the bubble and subsequent bust is being placed everywhere: Clinton, Bush, liberals, conservatives, greedy mortgage lenders, under qualified home buyers, crazy types of loans, government regulators asleep at the wheel. All of which are factors, but this misses the Much Bigger Question, which is:

We've had housing boom/bust cycles before. Never before did they threaten to take down the entire global financial system like this. What's so different this time?

What's so different is what was done with the mortgages after they were sold. Wall Street investment companies (Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, etc) were buying up as many mortgages as they could from banks and mortgage companies so they could repackage the loans into exotic instruments sold all over the world as AAA rated "safe" investments. Banks and mortgage companies were more than happy to quickly unload these increasingly risky mortgages onto someone else. Every step along the way, big commissions were being made. Unfortunately each step took the underlying risk and magnified it, while at the same time making the increasing risk less and less visible.

The result? The entire global financial system became an extremely leveraged house of cards, with risky mortgages forming the foundation.

To shift metaphors a bit, when the first domino fell (foreclosures and the drop in housing prices), Wall Street investment companies were the next domino in line. And there are a whole lot more dominoes starting to fall that were set in place by greed and lack of regulatory oversight. Insurance companies, pensions, entire countries, and much much more. We haven't seen the end of this.

Speaking of the end of this, here's an excellent (but lengthy) personal account of what was going on in Wall Street over the past decade. Titled "The End", it is authored by Michael Lewis, who worked for a while in Wall Street, and earlier wrote the book "Liars Poker".

When Bear Sterns and Lehman collapsed, putting thousands of investment analysts out of work, the photos I saw of them leaving their workplace for the last time seemed rather odd. They were mostly all smiling or at least not looking worried. Strange, for having suddenly just lost a very high paying job. But it turns out that a lot of them saw this coming a long time ago, and some even placed (and collected!) multi-million-dollar bets that the risky financial instruments they had created from mortgages would eventually take down the very companies they worked for. Not to mention, most of the global economy.

They knew. They knew...

(another really fascinating global meltdown scenario)

Whew

Thank goodness THAT'S over. I don't know how many more Presidential elections I can take. They're way too polarizing, and way too superficial for my liking.

The final Hood River Weather site poll was Obama 60%, McCain 32%. Nationally, the results were Obama 53%, McCain 46%. In Oregon, Obama 54%, McCain 42%. I don't have the results for Hood River County yet.

Meanwhile, the weather continues on its random walk into late Fall/Winter with lots of rain, some snow in the mountains, and tree leaves falling rapidly all over everything. It's almost as if... as if the Universe somehow goes on its way with very little concern about the political and economic concerns of humans on this tiny rock 93 million miles from an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy in a Universe full of so much more than we can possibly imagine.

Autumn

Ahh, Autumn. The autumnal equinox, equal days and nights. The start of Fall here, the start of Spring down under. The sun moves directly over the equator at noon today on its annual path through the seasons from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere.

Of course, it's not the sun doing the actual moving through the seasons; it's Earth sailing smoothly along its elliptical orbit around the sun, tilted just enough to present different hemispheres to the sun at different times of the year.

Speaking of things that are not sailing smoothly along, I am so relieved that the federal government has stepped in to save the faltering world economy with untold trillions of dollars that we don't really have and never will. I was very concerned that Wall Street brokerages, SEC regulators, banks, mortgage companies, and mortgage holders might actually be held responsible for mistakes made. Whew. That was close. Saved by the printing press.

For now. In the long run (maybe not so long of a run), by bankrupting our country, we can kiss our currency goodbye. Thought you had enough money set aside for a secure retirement? Think again. And, if you can, keep working.

Now that I've set a dismal tone for the beginning of Fall, here's an old Edgar Winter song that, although beautifully written and sung, never fails to put me in a vaguely depressed and melancholy state of mind:



Actually, I do love the autumn months. It's a visually stunning time of the year, and the weather is varied and interesting.

And I'm not really depressed. I'm just a little pissed off at the amount of irresponsibility and incompetence that has created this financial mess. And the laissez-faire "everything goes if it benefits businesses" approach of the government didn't help things.

I'll get over it. This too shall pass...

How Great Is This?

I've held off on posting about how great the weather is lately, since more often than not, whenever I mention how great the weather is lately, it takes a sudden turn for the worse. It's a knack of mine.

But I can't stand it anymore. The weather the past 2 weeks has been absolutely incredibly great. There, I've said it. Let the weather chips fall where they will.

September has always been my favorite weather month in Hood River (closely followed by the other 11 months). Typically warm days, cool nights, and the wind tends to die down in the transition from summer to fall.

Tomorrow marks the full Harvest Moon. Get out there and harvest, or at least celebrate the bounty from those that do plant and harvest. One excellent way to do that is to support locally grown food.

Full Moon On The Rise

Check out the full moon rising the next couple of evenings at sunset (around 9 pm). Due to seasonal alignments, the "solstice moon" is one of the more spectacular moonrises of the year. Local forecasts are for clear skies around sunset, so we might luck out on this one...

Warm After All

I just came in from planting veges, weeding, and mowing the lawn. Seeing as how I'm dripping wet with sweat, yesterday's post about it not being warm this weekend is another example of my strategy of "reverse psychology". For the most part, whenever I make a forecast, you can expect the opposite to happen.

Upper 70's outside, and much more humid than I expected, making for a very pleasant afternoon.

Looking somewhat further out into the sky, the Phoenix Mars Lander will hopefully make a soft landing near the polar region of Mars tomorrow. Success is not at all guaranteed; past Mars exploration missions have failed about 50% of the time. The ones that have succeeded have returned incredibly awesome images and lots of scientific data, which will make future long term colonization of Mars possible. If you are interested, you can follow the progress of the mission on NASA's various media feeds.

Spring Arrives (Sort Of)

You wouldn't know it from the cold, mostly cloudy weather lately, but today marks the return of Spring. The vernal equinox, with nearly equal hours of daytime and nighttime, occurs when the tilt of the earth on its axis places the sun directly over the equator.

Whereas February in Hood River was warmer than average, March has been cooler. There have only been two days so far (March 9-10) where the high reached the low to mid 60's. Sure would be nice to have some 70 degree days, but the forecast for the rest of the month is for more of the same.

Lots of snowpack in the mountains though!

What Time It Is

Does anybody really know? With apologies to the rock band Chicago, this week's Hood River Weather poll wonders if anybody really cares, or more specifically, what time switch strategy would you prefer?

It's somewhat mind boggling that the government can force us to set our alarm clocks so as to get us up an hour earlier 8 months out of the year. But not nearly as mind boggling as the concept and perception of time itself.

I like the extension of the daylight hours into the evening with Daylight Saving Time. But, then again, it's nice to have daylight in the early morning (especially in the winter), since my job and my exercise routine get me up at 5 am. My I-84 commute to The Dalles in the dark often brings hallucinations of possible deer or rockfall dead ahead, just out of the range of my headlights. Which, at highway speeds, is not very far ahead.

So, my ideal time switch would be DST from March through October, and then a 2 hour fall-back in winter for more daylight in the morning. But, they aren't asking me, and most likely they won't.

DST reduces national energy consumption by about 1% due to reduced need for electric lighting in the evenings. Or....does it?

Maybe the best plan would be to sleep more hours in the winter (and work fewer hours). Sort of a modified hibernation. Monthly pay, of course, would have to stay the same. I'll run that by my employer and see if it flies...

Total Lunar Eclipse Feb 20

Wednesday evening, we Earthlings will have a ringside seat to a total lunar eclipse. This will be the 3rd lunar eclipse within a year, but will be much easier to stay up for, as it starts here locally at moonrise (around 6 pm) and ends 3 hours later. The maximum redness of the Earth's shadow on the moon will be between 7 and 8 pm Pacific time. Check it out. Lunar eclipses are one of those "perspective-altering" events that can give us a glimpse of the Much Bigger Picture of which we're all a tiny little part. This is the last lunar eclipse for almost 3 years.

Hopefully the sky will be clear. If not, here's a 1 minute time lapse video of the Aug 2007 lunar eclipse. Note: lunar eclipses are usually not accompanied by such stirring music, unless you provide your own:

Space Exploration

This week's poll on the Hood River Weather site asks what our space exploration priorities should be, given the budget realities.

My opinion? For the immediate future, we should be focusing on the much less expensive option of using unmanned spacecraft to explore the planets, asteroids, and comets. The return on investment in science and exploration that unmanned missions provide is way more than that of manned missions.

In the very long run, if we are to survive as a species, we will eventually need to colonize further out from the Sun, to Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Our Sun, being a type G star, will become warmer at a rate that will make life on Earth impossible after another 300 million years or so.

We have plenty of time. In order to not repeat the Apollo program's short life, it would be better to have robotic missions build permanent bases on Mars and beyond before we send humans there. That way, we can go there to stay, not just do a few missions like Apollo and then quit.

UFOs?

The Hood River Weather site has featured a weekly poll for over a year now, and it's been fun to see how site visitors feel about various issues. One of my 2 blog goals this year is to do a new posting here with each poll, with my personal take on the issue, and y'all can elaborate on yours if you want.

OK, UFO's. In the mid to late 1960's, as a teenager, my fascination with all things skyward and beyond in the Universe prompted me to join two of the civilian UFO research groups in existence at that time: NICAP and APRO. Both groups gathered UFO reports and attempted to impartially separate the explainable sightings from those that would point directly at aliens as the most likely explanation.

I really wanted to believe that we were being visited; that the galaxy was teeming with intelligent space-faring civilizations, some of whom had discovered us here on Earth. After all, Star Trek and numerous science fiction TV and movies had plenty of aliens running around.

But over the years, nothing (including Roswell, alien abductions, and mysterious lights in the sky) has stood out as anything other than natural (and mostly honestly misinterpreted) phenomena. I'm still open to strong confirmable evidence that will irrefutably prove aliens are visiting our backwater section of our galaxy's suburbs. But Fermi's Paradox pretty much sums up my skepticism. Given the age of our galaxy, and the fact that many other solar systems have existed millions of years longer than ours, much older civilizations have had plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy if that was likely or possible. And it would be obvious. But it's not. In fact, in the EM spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, including radio, the galaxy appears to be absent of intelligent signals. Except, of course, our own radio and TV broadcasts, spreading outwards at the speed of light and now in a sphere about 75 light years in diameter from Earth. BTW, for those who would like to participate in the ongoing search for radio wave evidence for intelligent life, I highly recommend running the Seti@home software.

Here's my take on life in the universe: Given that there are likely millions of planets that can support life in the billions of galaxies that exist, molecular and single cell life is probably very common. Multi-cellular organisms (plants and animals) take a lot longer to emerge, and are less common. Intelligent and space-faring life is probably extremely uncommon; the result of a improbable combination of selective, very random events over millions of years of evolution. And, any such civilizations are likely to find the unimaginably immense distances (translate: travel time) between stars insurmountable, assuming they don't become extinct first. Maybe they create intelligent autonomous robotic probes to travel and colonize for them, but... where the heck are they...

So, maybe we are one of some Extremely Isolated Intelligent species in the Universe, which only makes our own human existence even more marvelous and precious and worthy of our best efforts to preserve our planet and not destroy ourselves and our fellow species.

Hopefully this will be the longest post I will ever make in this blog. :)

In With The New

Tuesday marks the first day of the New Year in the Gregorian calendar system, established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. It defined the yearly orbit of the Earth around the Sun as 365 days (366 days every 4th year, more or less), divided between 12 months. And it keeps consistent calendar time pretty darn well, with an occasional few seconds added or subtracted here and there to keep pace with the reality of changing orbital mechanics.

But it's not the only "New Years Day"'; there are a couple of dozen other days scattered around the year on which other cultures and calendars mark the start of yet another cycle of our planet around our star.

Regardless of how we humans mark the passage of time, the Earth quietly continues its majestic elliptical orbit around the Sun's mass, following the curve of gravity's warping of the fabric of space itself.

And to top it all off, we have the incredibly awesome privilege of being conscious beings, able to gaze out into this universe, and celebrate the wonder of it all.

Have a wonder-full New Year!

P.S. The following video is a time lapse movie of Earth from NASA's Messenger spacecraft (launched Aug 2004). The stunning hi-res video was recorded in Aug 2005, a year later, as the spacecraft swung by Earth again for a gravity assist slingshot towards Venus. Its ultimate goal is to achieve orbit around Mercury (the innermost planet to the sun) in 2009 - 2011.

Winter Solstice

Happy Winter Solstice! From here on, the daylight hours get longer, slowly but surely, thanks to the axial tilt of our home planet. And not a moment too soon.

Shine On

The full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is called the Harvest moon. There are several reasons why. The reason that is almost too obvious to mention (but I will), is that this is a peak harvest time of the year. Throughout history, farmers could continue harvesting well into the night.

Also, just as the sun rises directly east and sets directly west on the first day of Fall, so does the moonrise and moonset around this time of the year. This puts the moon pretty much directly overhead in the night sky, rather than lower in the sky, which makes the lighting a little bit brighter than usual.

Autumnal Equinox

Today is the autumnal equinox, otherwise known as the first day of Autumn (the first day of Spring in the southern hemisphere). Discounting twilight, and the refraction of light through the atmosphere, and a couple of other minor discrepancies, the length of the day equals the length of the night.

The changing seasons are due to the 23 degree tilt of the earth relative to its orbital plane around the sun. Today, the sun's path is directly over the equator.

Also, today the sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west. Mark the spots with gigantic stone blocks and you'll always know exactly where east and west are.

Or you could use a compass. Or a GPS. We sure do have things a lot easier than our ancient ancestors did...

Comet Dust, Dead Ahead

Right on schedule, the annual Perseid meteor shower peaks on Monday morning, August 13th. The best viewing will be from midnight to 4 am, so a Sunday afternoon/evening nap is definitely justified. This year's cosmic fireworks show should be especially good, since the moon won't be in the sky at the time. You can expect to see 1 to 2 meteors a minute, especially if you are in an area away from city lights and you follow these suggestions.

The Perseid shower occurs every August as the Earth plows through the debris field left by comet Swift-Tuttle. Most of the material is the size of a grain of sand, and since it impacts the atmosphere at a brisk 37 miles per second, it burns up quickly.

More Astronomy

Since the weather has settled into a uneventful series of beautifully sunny but cool days, I thought I would post another astronomy picture that is rather stunning.

The newly released picture is from the Cassini mission now orbiting Saturn, and is taken from behind Saturn, looking back towards the Sun. The Sun is blocked (eclipsed) by Saturn, and the rings and colors are astounding, even surreal:


Even more astounding is the small white dot next to one of the outer rings in the left center of the picture (click on the picture for a larger version). That's Earth in the far distance, about 750 million miles from Saturn. A very small speck in the bigger scheme of things.

Comet McNaught

It's not very much of a leap (at least for me) from an interest in weather to an interest in astronomy. Both involve looking up at the sky, and being often amazed and awestruck at what's out there. Here's one of the better views of Comet McNaught, the brightest and most spectacular comet that most of us will ever be able to experience in our lifetime:

And here's more recent pictures taken by the person who first discovered the comet (who, oddly enough, has the same last name as the comet! What are the odds!?)

The comet has swung around the sun and is starting its trip back to the outer regions of our solar system. It is now visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, the viewing opportunities here in Hood River were few, due to clouds. There were, however, a couple of clear evenings a week ago. Did anyone see the comet?