5 September 2014

I had to go to a meeting tonight and when I got to Brooklyn I saw the Moon next to a deck of cloud and remembered that I had forgotten to bring my binocular with me. Fortunately the Moon was just to the upper right of the Empire State building when I got home and I was able to make the macro photographs I needed to make so I could take the tripod out to observe the Moon before it moved very far. The Empire State building was illuminated in green, yellow and either blue or red tonight, I have forgotten now and everyone was stopping to photograph it with the Moon so close by.

The light on the Moon is looking pretty flat tonight and all the maria are turning light gray but the cat is still darker than the surrounding portions of Mare Nubium so was still visible.

I looked up and there was a black stripe running straight up the sky. My first thought was it was the light pollution coming out of the World Trade Center site but then I realized that that would be brighter than the sky and was indeed visible down 6 Ave. Then I realized that it was where a jet had flown through a cloud evaporating moisture and creating a negative contrail. I have seen this before and suspect that I have written about it and possibly included a photograph.

The building on the left is the Grace building. In the center of the frame is the HBO building. This is a rather simple structure but the spandrels have grown on me and I now feel that it is a handsome building. In the lower right corner is the light from the Klieg lights on top of the MetLife building that turn night into noon in Bryant Park and make almost anything but lunar observing impossible there. In the upper right corner is the Bank of America Tower.

The same cloud 57 seconds later