Red sky at night

I wish I lived on the other side of the hill.

Red sky at night! Wish I could have got up the hill. But it faded quickly after taking this shot. I’ve seen a couple of photos on Facebook which were taken by other people.

A gale force wind and storms are forecast for later tonight up in the north of the UK. But that’s mainly Scotland. Hopefully this means that the weather here will be OK. Its still a long time till spring. Lots of cold, wet, windy weather still to come.

Sunset

Only 93 million miles away. The sun sets… But it really set 8 minutes earlier! It’s just that light takes that long to get from the sun to us.

OK, now look up at the stars. Some of them are actual stars and others are nebulae and galaxies.

Light takes time to travel. They talk about light years, some stars are only a few light years away. Some are thousands, or millions, or billions of light years away.

Now think about radio waves. They travel at the speed of light too… So TV and radio signals from Earth started travelling from when we first broadcast radio back in the 1920’s or 30’s? Thats a sphere around the Earth with a radius of about 90 or 100 years. So a planet 90 light years away might just about be hearing our signals. Imagine what they would do. They can’t travel here at the speed of light, but they might reply, but that will take 90 years to reply. Closer stars could have planets that reply sooner. But it’s still going to be a boring conversation!

Sunset, Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent

DSC_2263DSC_2261

As we left Etruria tonight a red glow was spreading at the bottom of the grey clouds. As we got up to the top of the hill it had spread across the sky with the sun peeping through. This was a reminder of ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, red sky in the morning shepherd’s take warning’. I’m hoping this means things will cool down tomorrow. I’ve got a lot of things to do. The temperature reached 38.6°C and we are not used to it here. Global warming seems to be getting worse. I do wonder if we can get the temperature under control. The anthropocene era seems likely to be one of mass extinctions sadly.