Moonlight becomes you

We caught the Full Snow Moon this morning as traffic rushed by east and west on Marginal Street, with the salt piles of Eastern Minerals, left, in the middle ground.

It was too early -- too little ambient light -- for a clear shot without tripod, and we weren't in the mood, but serendipitously the little Pentax Optio 450 captured a romantically heart-shaped double exposure (I heard somebody whisper "please adore me"):

The Full Snow Moon this morning as it set in the east, transformed by an unintended double exposure into a glowing symbol of love.

Meanwhile the side yard, covered with a fresh coat of snow, mapped the comings and goings of Tiny and Baby and neighborhood puddies checking out the little house. This sort of thing goes on all the time, but without the snow record we'd never know the half of it.

The door of the little house -- facing west -- was momentarily illuminated by morning sunlight coming from the east, reflected from the diningroom window back onto the house. As we blogged here, albedo -- the ratio of reflected to incident light, as with moonlight -- is not a pretty word, but the effects are often magical.

Comments

[The Prop]

"Albedo" not beautiful? Hmn. It's from Arabic, along with alchemy/chemistry (al khemi), algebra, etc. You could do a pretty long essay on the wonderful contributions of Islamic society to world science before they became subsumed by superstition and bigotry. A lesson there for all of us, bedeviled as we are by the Creationists, the anti-stem cell'ers, et al.

It was a Muslim who probably looked at moonlight reflecting off a sand dune and, while appreciating its beauty, also decided to calculate why it seemed to glow of its own accord when it wasn't actually generating any light. A thousand years later we use the same math to figure out the surface composition of other bodies in the solar system.

They did it before and they can contribute again.

[Sissy Willis]

Breathtaking insight, there, old boy. I'm shivering with delight. Thanks so much.