I flow with the river, the year and the seas, and I'm flowing, I'm turning

[sovay]

In half an hour's stargazing from the top of Robbins Farm, I saw two short swift streaks of light that I felt comfortable identifying as shooting stars of the Ursids and a third uncertain blip that might only have been my eyes adjusting to another star in the hard clear sky of 15 °F. They were striking out across the precession of the equinoxes, Thuban, Kochab and Mizar, Polaris. I could have missed others as I kept turning under the winter constellations that even a suburban night was finally cold enough for, the jewels of Mars and Jupiter, the quarter-moon coming up so huge and orange at the edge of the skyline that we checked to make sure it wasn't some kind of catastrophe: it shrank out of the haze of Boston and turned ice-white. I would have lain down in the snow if I had been wearing my leather jacket and filled my field of vision with stars. Instead spatch praised my endurance for standing out in the sandblasting cold, even after I had to come back to the car because I took off one of my gloves and my fingers seized up: "You were dipped in the Atlantic . . . But your hands had reached into the deepest part." I held them in the dashboard vents until the color came back into them. When I carried his phone with its star-map app back across the field, it kept showing me the astronomy on the other side of the earth, an Etruscan underworld's worth of sky.

Comments

[selkie]

You made it! Huzzah!
How many fingers do you have remaining?

*gently takes the Flynn/Macfarlane album and stores it in lead for now*

[sovay]

You made it! Huzzah!
How many fingers do you have remaining?

I did and it was worth it and I have all my usual number of fingers with which I still about eight-and-a-half-finger type!

*gently takes the Flynn/Macfarlane album and stores it in lead for now*

Says the person just wrote a dolmen.

*hugs*

[selkie]

A dolmen on Bryher, for the sake of precision before collapsing. *hugs*

[sovay]

A dolmen on Bryher, for the sake of precision before collapsing.

Look, the "Burial Blessing" sounded good in the middle of a midwinter field.

[selkie]

The Room of the Ladies really holds up but I keep finding carnelian beads just everywhere and I can't stop sneezing.

[sovay]

The Room of the Ladies really holds up but I keep finding carnelian beads just everywhere and I can't stop sneezing.

I bet it's the pollen.

[vass]

That's beautiful.

[sovay]

That's beautiful.

I was so glad to be there.

[asakiyume]

"You were dipped in the Atlantic . . . But your hands had reached into the deepest part." --I love it. So glad you got to see some Ursids!

....It is definitely sandblastingly cold out. Interstellar cold. (okay, I exaggerate. But just a bit.)

[sovay]

--I love it. So glad you got to see some Ursids!

Thank you! I knew I might not see anything, but I wanted to try and I felt rewarded. I did not even get frostbite.

....It is definitely sandblastingly cold out. Interstellar cold. (okay, I exaggerate. But just a bit.)

"The cold of the void, of black space . . ."

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, well done! And this is a beautiful account of the occasion, too. <3

[sovay]

Aw, well done! And this is a beautiful account of the occasion, too.

Thank you! It felt like the right thing to do for new winter. And it made me very happy.

[minoanmiss]

Oh my heart!

[sovay]

Oh my heart!

*hugs*

[pameladean]

I love this post so much.

I too am entranced with the upsidedown view from Stellarium.

P.

[sovay]

I love this post so much.

*hugs*

I too am entranced with the upsidedown view from Stellarium.

I haven't played with it much! spatch loaded it onto his phone last night so that we could be sure of finding the radiant. He had a similar or perhaps just previous generation app when we first met and were looking at a conjunction. But I love that it does not discriminate hemispherically.

[ethelmay]

I remember being able to lie very comfortably in the snow in my sheepskin coat when I was in college. Unfortunately it was one of the casualties of my last minor growth spurt in my freshman year of college (I grew an inch and went up a shoe size, and the shoulders of everything got too small).

[sovay]

I remember being able to lie very comfortably in the snow in my sheepskin coat when I was in college. Unfortunately it was one of the casualties of my last minor growth spurt in my freshman year of college (I grew an inch and went up a shoe size, and the shoulders of everything got too small).

I too would miss a coat like that.