I like to decorate our mailbox with plastic flowers. I just changed out the autumn colors with these pretty poinsettias for the Christmas season. There is an antique milk can surrounding the mailbox post that is filled with sand. It makes a handy place to put the stems of the flowers into. Click on the image to enlarge.

This is one of many trees around town that have changed colors from the summer green to all shades of yellows, oranges and reds. This tree is located along the main drag (US 60) a half mile west of old downtown. Click on the image to enlarge.

This morning, I browsed my usual daily visits on the internet. When I got to the webpage at SpaceWeather.com, I noticed several sunspots were visible on the “Daily Sun” feature in the left sidebar. That made me have the urge to go out and capture an image of the sun over Arizona to see if I could resolve any of the sunspots. There were three distinct spots in my image, which I labeled, as seen on the right. The solar north pole is at about the ten o’clock point in the image I made. I didn’t bother to rotate the solar image to align the pole at the top as I sometimes do. Click on the image to enlarge.

I visited the SOHO Sunspot page to get the designation numbers of the sunspots in the photo, I noticed a link to a new feature called Helioviewer which purported to allow users anywhere make their own custom images and movies. After fooling with the website a bit, I made the video below to document the spots in my image. The motion starts about 24 hours before advancing to how the sun looked today. Solar north is up and the recording was made through a hydrogen alpha (or equivalent) filter. The bright spots are the location of the spots in my image above. See this screenshot from the Helioviewer site for reference.

After seeing the brilliant rainbow colors in the clouds near the sun, I went to get my camera and get some pictures. In this image, it appears that there is an object that resembles a planet or something near the sun. It actually is a phantom image of the overexposed sun, itself, caused by the camera lens optics. It is interesting and pretty, don’t you think? Click on the image to enlarge.

Since we have a smallish house, we won’t be putting up a massive Christmas tree as we did in the old house. Instead, we have a little tabletop tree with lights and ornaments miniaturized. I always like to bring out a couple of my cute little troll dolls to add to the festive mood. Click on the image to enlarge.

Tax season is here again, at least in our household. I had been waiting for our tax software provider to notify us of the availability of the product for the 2013 tax year. Today, the offer was in the mail. Not hesitating, I downloaded the software, installed it and dove right in to start putting in our 2013 data.

In a matter of less than an hour, I had most of the updated figures plugged into the program. We have a pretty similar tax situation to that of our 2012 return, so most things were already imported from last year by the software. A few tweaks here and there gave us a pretty good idea of where we will be when we finally file in early February.

Of course, the IRS will be modifying things until the December 31 deadline and probably beyond then knowing how efficient the .gov is. Meanwhile, we can pour over the figures we know about and look for some shortcuts to maximize our refund.

This three-panel slideshow contains amateur photographs of some of the things we have seen in the sky over the last few days. The first and second panels show “sun dogs” and the last panel shows a circumhelical arc, all of which are rainbow-colored patches of refracted sunlight through ice crystals high in the Earth’s atmosphere. I used my hand to block out the direct sunlight in the last panel.

Damsel caught a beautiful photo of the sun and optics about a year ago. Click on the images to advance the slideshow.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and to yours!

CB&D

Since the rain last week, we have been having the most lovely fall weather. I took this panoramic photo of the mountains northeast of town yesterday afternoon. The clear skies and mild temperatures made for a beautiful fall day. Click on the image to enlarge.

Finally, after several days of overcast and rainy weather, we have a cloudless Arizona sky. While we were walking the dogs this morning, I took this photo of the neighbor’s flagpole with the third quarter moon above.

The forecast is for continued sunshine and cooler temperatures with highs typically mid-sixties and lows in the low forties. You can see from the flag that the winds are light and variable. Click on the image to enlarge.