Serene Scenery Sunday

Hi everypuppy and everycat! It's me, Ammy, here with Serene Scenery Sunday. As many of you know, I am the Chief Meteorologist at Ao4 Headquarters. I'm coming to you today from my office, here in the weather lab.

Me. Ammy. Chief Meteorologist, Ao4 HQs.

Not that kind of Lab. Sorry.

Anyway, as the boys mentioned yesterday, we had front-row seats at quite the spectacular event this weekend -- a partial lunar eclipse! It was very exciting and beautiful! Instead of going into a technical explanation of the whole thing (though if you'd like to study up on it, please click here!) I thought I'd show you the whole thing, start to finish! We all just loved this and it gave us great serenity and everything -- so let's go!

It all started for us with Friday's sunset...

Sunset over the Flint Hills

Aren't the colors warm and wonderful? Then eventually the moon rose. It looked like this:

The moon. Pre-eclipse.

That was at about 2130. Umm... 9:30 p.m. AKA almost bedtime for Siberians. Actually, we didn't get to bed until much later, but that's another story. As Zimmie told you yesterday, he knew how excited Mom was about following along with the eclipse, so he woke her up every hour. Isn't he sweet?!? And sure enough, by about 0520, this is what Mom saw off our deck:

The start of the eclipse!

See how the Earth is starting to cast its shadow on the "top" of the moon?!?

Here's what was happening by 0540:

Ten minutes later:

(Mom says sorry about the power line, but that's the way it goes.)

You can tell the sun was coming up in the opposite sky! It was getting light out and hard to capture the moon's image. See how HUGE it looks, though?!?! It's that "Moon Illusion" phenomenon!!! (Read more here and see some awesome photos by entering "moon illusion" in your search engine, and hitting "images"! Really!)

OK... so back to Ao4 HQs... here's what the sky looked like at 0555:

And just a couple minutes later, the moon had almost vanished:

And it was red like that and everything! Oh, how I wish you could have seen it! I just had to show you!

Also as Zim said, we had a full moon! Here's what that looked like last night:

Full moon on 26 June 2010

Isn't it glorious?!!? That was at about 2200 hours. It was huge and oh, so beautiful!

That's about it for Serene Scenery Sunday. I hope you enjoyed this week's edition.

"Yes, Davy. I'm done. You can go back to howling now!"

He really does have such a nice voice!

Love,
Ammy

PS: We have lots more pictures of the eclipse and full moon in our FlickR Sunsets and Sky Shots set; you are welcome to visit to see more!