Long-legged turtle-necked horses of the arctic

Winter is a great time for a lot of things but, quite disappointingly, naked pagan dancing is not one of them.  Cold weather and Seinfeldian shrinkage notwithstanding, tonight is the best opportunity for naked pagan dancing in winter in 372 years.  Why? Because tonight, starting at 00:33 CST a lunar eclipse will occur on a solstice.  That hasn’t happened since 1638 – pretty cool. NASA’s page about it is excellent.  My goodness, Dr. Tony Phillips is a scientist who can write concisely and understandably, and apparently he knows some good graphic artists.

So what do I plan to do with this information?  Well, I’ve been watching the visible satellite at intervals today to see if there is even a chance at a clear sky tonight. Visible satellite images are for total weather geeks, as we know that the usual satellite images that you see on television are infrared (IR) satellite images, which are really an indication of the temperature of cloud tops, which are then represented by differing shades of white.  Pooh pooh, IR is not real data.  Visible satellite imaging is ground truth.  Ok, cloud truth.  However, weather geek strategy falls to dust when the sun goes down, since visible satellite is just that, a visible picture of clouds taken from a geosynchronous satellite 36k km above the earth.  When the sun goes down, the clouds are not visible.  Wah.  But I digress.

Anyway, there appears to be a break, or at least a thinning of the clouds that may pass over our house in central Iowa just around the right time.  So, here’s my plan.  Set the alarm for 00:25, put on boots and a big coat over my jammies and go out on the deck and watch the earth’s shadow take the first small bite out of the bright white disk of the moon.  Then I’ll probably watch that for a bit.  Snap a few pictures.  Then I’ll get sleepy and go lie on the couch for a few hours.  Then the alarm goes off again at 0300, when I will get up and put on really warm clothes and take a few pictures of what should be a blood red moon.  I’ll go out and see what the horses are doing.  I love any excuse to walk out to the pasture  in the quiet of night and be with the boys.  Maybe they’ll be in the barn, where they can come and go at will.  I love that they’ll probably be awake as day, the same way they are dozey as night at 10 a.m. everyday.  Their sleep cycles aren’t like ours.  They don’t stay up 16 hours straight and sleep 8.  They like it best to stay awake 3 hours and sleep 30 minutes or something.  I once had an off track thoroughbred who laid down in his stall and fell into a deep doze between dressage and xc at his first show.  He popped awake for xc and galloped like a metronome around the course.  King of the catnap.  Crazy.

With all the puttering around tonight, maybe I’ll be a little tired tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll have to sneak off for a catnap.  I guess I’ll be sleeping like a horse.  Enjoy.