August 25, 2003

• It’s out there.

  
  

  Space, I mean… the space at the outer edges of our atmosphere and beyond.  Some of my most interesting email comes from the services I’ve subscribed to at NASA.gov and SpaceWeather.com, and my screen saver crunches data for SETI at Home.  “Out there”, in my lexicon means not only exterior, elsewhere, but “‘way out”, “far out”, wildly exotic and fascinating, almost unimaginably weird and interesting.  For  me, “out there” implies both approval and marvel.

  
  

  This morning I was lured to SpaceWeather.com by the subject line, “Aurora Season”.  The terrestrial weather here tells me it’s about that time of year:  chilly and damp.  It has been raining here, is raining as I write this.  Cloud cover would have kept me from seeing any aurora most nights lately.  The temp outside is around 13°C (that’s just a hair above 50°F for you inflexible Americans).  A couple of mornings ago it was below 40°F, around 4°C.  If the clouds would clear off during the hours of darkness, we would have frost again, but we’d be able so see an aurora if there was one.  That’s an acceptable tradeoff for me. 

  
  

  So far this year, our end of the Susitna Valley has had some freezing temperatures each month.  My neighbor’s marigolds are pitiful, but the frosts haven’t been hard enough to do much damage to berries or wildflowers, beyond a little cosmetic touch of bronze or black.  Our temps are nothing but freezing, of course, up through April and into May every year, but a summer with frosts in July is rare here.  Early June to mid-August is ordinarily our frost-free growing season, but not this year.

  
  

  I didn’t feel like suiting up for the wet, so I stuck the camera out an open window (the one in the bathroom where the cats–ours and now three strays as well–go in and out) to get this shot of the backyard.  The white fuzzy things are the “sails” on the fireweed seeds, that carry them on the wind.  The flowers are all gone.  Pretty soon it will be cold enough we’ll need to shut that window and start playing doorman to the cats again.  I wonder if any of the strays will come in through the door this winter.  Maybe, if it’s cold enough, and they get hungry or thirsty….

  
  

  Usually our first snowfall is around Labor Day, and the first that doesn’t melt but stays on the ground until May or June usually falls in early to mid-October.   The State Fair is going on this week.  There are only two more weeks of Farmer’s Markets until the end of the season.  Yikes!  This summer has really gone by fast for me.

  
  

  But… I digressed again, didn’t I?  The topic was space, and I stole this neat pic from Spaceweather.com, a composite shot from a video Roland Stalder of Lucerne, Switzerland took of the International Space Station crossing between Earth and the sun.  There is an animation of the video at the website.

  
  

  SpaceWeather.com — News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

  
  

  

  • 2:21 pm
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