To the Midwest I go

This is actually a picture of the Northern Lights (taken at different wavelengths of light) over Ontario, just north of where I'm going.  Let me just say, as an astronomy teacher, I see a lot of photos...and this picture is INCREDIBLE.  You can see the major cities of the East at night, and the photo centers over Lake Michigan with Chicago glaring front its southwestern corner - SO BEAUTIFUL!

One of my lifelong dreams is to see the Northern Lights - what if it happened while I was there?!

PS - stay turned for many a foliage picture.  heck friggin yes!

Image Credit : NASA, NOAA, GSFC, Suomi NPP, Earth Observatory,
processing by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon

Astronomy club!

Of course, I'm the sponsor for Astronomy Club - look how CUTE my kids are?! They wanted to make posters to advertise :)

an annular eclipse

For those in the Western US (or Asia!), you got to catch a glimpse of the Moon sitting almost perfectly between us and the Sun.  Called the "Ring of Fire", we only saw it as a crescent sun, but it was still SO COOL!   The last solar eclipse in the US was in the early '90's ('93?), which I watched as a wee lass in Indiana. 

I set up my telescope at church, got some eclipse glasses, and Vivi took some sweet pictures.

Lunar eclipse PART 1

The last lunar eclipse (where the Moon goes through Earth's shadow in space) til 2014 was yesterday morning here in Tucson. If you're lucky enough to live in Hawaii, Alaska, or Asia, you saw the whole thing at night! Well, here we caught the Moon going into totality as it was setting, so when the Moon was fully eclipsed, the Sun had risen enough to where it looked as if the Moon became invisible because there was so too much light in the sky. To test my phone's abilities, I took some shots with it...not bad, eh?