Blog
Keep up to date on what is happening in the Driftless
Driftless Dark Skies: Two Full Moons in a Month
January opens with the Full Wolf Moon and ends with a Total Lunar Eclipse. It is unusual to enjoy two Full Moons in the same month, but it can happen because the time between Full Moons is 29 ½ days. That means no Full Moons for February but two for March. There is no...
Driftless Dark Skies: Northern Lights
By 7:30pm on November 7, I was already a pretty happy stargazer. I had been out for an hour and a half with a good astrobuddy touring the clusters, galaxies, and nebulas of the autumn sky at a dark site near Governor Dodge State Park. Our hands and feet were getting...
Driftless Dark Skies: Occultation and Conjunction
Two special events this month let us experience the Moon and planets moving across the sky. We are familiar with the daily motion of Sun and Moon and stars and planets rising in the east and setting in the west as our planet rotates about its axis. But we can also...
Fall Arrives
The fall season arrived officially on September 22, but fall colors arrive on their own time. I am out on the Kickapoo River to survey for a deadfall removal project. I am in the front of the canoe, mapping and fidgeting with my GPS locator. Then I look up and...
Driftless Dark Skies: Autumnal Dawn
We think of evening as the ideal time for stargazing. The sun sets, the sky darkens, and one by one the stars and planets emerge. If you look to the east just after sunset, you can see Earth’s shadow just above the horizon. Darkness does not fall—it rises! We spend...
Driftless Dark Skies: Be Awed!
I’m told that I use the word awesome a lot. I’m usually content enough with the everyday experiences of hiking in the Driftless Area, biking its back roads, and enjoying outdoor music and plays. But I love those moments of awe when they happen. I’ve been reading some...
Driftless Dark Skies: Shakespeare’s Eclipse
Eclipses are an amazing coincidence. The Moon needs to orbit between Sun and Earth. It can’t be too high or too low when it passes between. It needs to be the right distance so that it exactly covers the Sun. And we need to be on the right spot on Earth to stand...
Fishing on a Driftless Summer Day
Rivers have had their say again, and seldom have they spoken so loudly. Halfway through summer, people throughout the Midwest are still wrangling with the aftermath of June flooding. As rivers return to their banks, life, as it must, returns to summer.
Driftless Dark Skies: Summer of Saturn
There’s a little bit of showmanship in sharing stargazing. It helps to be mindful that other people might not be quite as wowed as you are by the sight of a faint fuzzy thing in the eyepiece of a telescope (even if it is the combined light of hundreds of billions of...
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