partial lunar eclipse

A photo, with a digital SLR and an ordinary lens, of the partial lunar eclipse this morning, looking nice and red:

By the time a longer lens was fitted to the camera, low cloud had bubbled up and hidden the moon.  (We should have been better prepared: we will be for the partial solar eclipse in a fortnight.) In fact, the moon was nearly set anyway, as can be seen by "enhancing" the picture above, making the horizon visible:

A bit later, the sky was light, with an amazing contrail disappearing into the distance, as if following the setting moon.

You can identify on this picture where the moon was above, by comparing horizon profiles.  (The spike pointing to the moon is the pylon on the right.)  And yes, that position is still in cloud.

sunset with a bonus

Gorgeous sunset, with a bonus Venus -- can you spot it?  (You will probably need to click on the image to make it full size.)

18:30GMT, looking west

Here's a clue:

king of the castle

We had a tree cut down recently. One of the neighbourhood cats clearly likes this new perch.

what a difference a day makes

Yesterday, we had had nine sunny days since the beginning of the month, and the solar PV plot looked amazing.

Today broke the streak.  It was not sunny: it was full cloud cover all day, with a bit of brightness around noon.  The solar PV plot now looks very different, with a lot of (pale) orange filling in the minimum to lower quartile range:

Nine sunny days in March

I make a variety of plots of data from our solar PV system.  One set is of the power generation over the day, plotted on a background of the month (so far) averages.  February looked like this:

The horizontal time axis runs from 3:00am to 9:00pm GMT. The vertical axis runs from zero to 8kW. The orange regions indicate the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and maximum generation at that time, over the month. The line indicates the actual generation at that time.  Several days have very little generation, with the black generation line hugging the x-axis (February this year seemed a particularly dark month), so the orange fills the shape.

March so far has been somewhat different:

Nearly full sun every day; hardly any orange in sight on the plots.  Even on the 7th, originally forecast to be dull, there were only a few dips in an otherwise bright day.  It has been very mild, even warm.

The weather is due to break tomorrow.  Ah well, it was glorious while it lasted!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIX

The latest batch:

not in a pear tree

 View from our kitchen window:

snapped on my phone through the kitchen window, so a little bit of reflection on some pics

This red-legged partridge was pecking around under the birdfeeder, on which was a great tit flinging seed around.

By the time we got a proper camera with a bigger lens, this bird had flown.