K-Squared Ramblings

That Belt of Venus Thing

About a month ago I posted about noticing the Belt of Venus—the red band that circles the entire horizon just after sunset—and the Earth’s shadow on the sky. I snapped this picture on the drive home this evening. This is looking east, away from the setting sun.

If you look at the right edge of the picture, behind the silhouette of the tree, you can just see the red band fading into the dark gray of the Earth’s shadow.

(And to think, I almost brought the good camera with me this morning… Update: It turns out that I did bring it, and just didn’t realize it was there. Oh, well.)

Feathered Sunset

Here’s a picture of last Wednesday’s sunset (September 14) as seen from the 405 in Irvine.

The photo links to a larger copy.

And no, I wasn’t trying to get the “monolith” in there. I don’t remember exactly where this was, so I’m not even sure what the sign is for.

Look, up in the sky!

A few nights ago I was walking around sunset, and decided to look for something that had been mentioned last week on the Astronomy Picture of the Day: the Belt of Venus.

Somehow I’d never noticed that after sunset, the band of red encircles the entire sky at the horizon. Even more amazing, if you look away from the sun you can actually see the Earth’s shadow on the sky as a slightly darker blue below the pink. It reminded me of the view of Mauna Kea’s shadow on the cloud layer below. Oddly, though I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time, the Belt of Venus is clearly visible in that photo!

I guess at sunset I’m most likely to be looking at, well, the sunset. Or focusing on whatever it is I’m doing at the time.

This was Thursday night, so the moon was almost full. It rose just below the Belt of Venus, just inside the shadow. So close to the horizon, the moon illusion was in full effect, and it looked huge!

And me without my camera. *sigh*

Mauna Kea

And now for something completely different: Hawaiian snow. On our second-to-last day in Hawaii, we took a tour up to the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in the state at 13,796 feet. And even in early April, they still had snow at the summit.

We caught a somewhat hazy view of it from the west, in the Kohala area, but our best view of the mountain actually came the day after the tour, on our drive out to Akaka Falls. We’re probably due east of the mountain here:

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