Floating away

Yesterday evening, I was in my office, where I had gone to organize my ideas a little bit and not much else, and I went up to the roof to send the worries away.

And there I found a show of an amazing calm. The sky was very clean; a warm but very pleasant wind was gently blowing around me; the place was very silent, strangely for its location; and several small clouds were passing by overhead, unravelling as they floated away, as ships disappearing in the sea.


and on top of it all a gibbous moon that shone more intensely than usual at that last moment of daylight.


We have had three beautiful days in a row —without any typhoon nearby, which is not so usual— and this looked like the final act of the show.

Well, there were other special lights shining later in the night, but that is a different story.

(Partial) Solar Eclipse

Naturally, we had a date with the solar eclipse this morning. It was a partial one in Taiwan, about 82%. If you wanted to see the total eclipse, you would not need to go too far away from here, to China, to Shanghai for instance, where a lot of people of the ASIAA and Shida went to, but I still do not know how was the weather like there. It was not my case; I did not travel this time.

So, several people got together to see the show this morning.

The sky was not completely clear, because we had the same kind of clouds as yesterday, but we did not have any problem to follow the evolution of the eclipse, be it with filters, cameras or a simple pinhole.


I could also see the sickle-shaped shadows of the tree leaves that I had seen on other occasions,

which give a fantastic flair to the place.

The clouds were good for two things: they made the waiting a little bit cooler and allowed us to make some spectacular pictures, without any filter and just holding the camera.


The rest of the day has been somewhat disappointing, of course, but I was surprised at how excited I was just remembering what I saw one year ago in China.

After the rain

We finally had a thunderstorm this afternoon. It did not last long and it did not carry too much rain, but it is the first storm that I can remember recently. From my window, I could see the dark sky towards the South and the lightning criss-crossing between the clouds. It is very strange how dry is the weather on these last few weeks. The best thing was the sky after the rain.

Triangle

If you read this today, maybe you will still have the chance to see it. These days, Jupiter (mù xīng) and Venus (jīn xīng) are getting close to conjunction, and the Moon has joined them very close today. All together creates a very nice triangle up in the sky. And in a day so beautiful as today —we are very lucky lately— the scene was complete with the last colors of sunset. Can you tell which is which?