Patience pays off

Well, patience pays off. Last night I got a pretty decent shot of Day 6 of this month’s lunation:

And tonight, I had all but given up hope of shooting the moon after only 7 days, because of the low but very heavy cloud cover that we were experiencing all evening. But I decided to make a bunch of feature maps, and that kept me up and interested enough that the clouds went away, and voilà: the streak continues! Day seven of this January’s lunation yields a picture:

Astronomy is one of those pursuits that does indeed teach the virtues of patience. At the same time, though, it teaches the virtue of taking advantage of whatever brief windows of opportunity present themselves!

In case you were wondering about the sequence (what happened to days four and five of this lunation?), that was broken up by the untimely demise of my trusty laptop’s video card. But all hail Apple! I took the computer in Wednesday morning to the Apple store in Wellington (the only one in the area that had an appointment early enough to suit me), they did the test in about 10 minutes, determined what the problem was, discovered they didn’t have the parts in stock to fix it on site, shipped it to Houston, and got it back to me this morning! Let that be a lesson to you: always pay the extra cash for the 3-year Apple Care plan; it’s saved my bacon at least twice with this machine already.

Here are shots of days 4 and 5 of this lunation: