Good morning! Happy Saturday! 😃 It’s the bleak of winter. Five weeks to Snow Moon 🌕 . Partly clear and 21 degrees in Delmar, NY. ❄ There is a west-northwest breeze at 13 mph. 🍃 with gusts up to 23 mph 💨💨💨. The current wind chill is 8. There are 2 inches of snow on the ground. ☃ ️I am trying to imagine it not being real cold outside, but that’s hard to imagine with the wind whipping around. The skies are blue but there is a pretty steady breeze. The sun is still struggling to reach the horizon.

While I posted probably too much yesterday, 📜 I saved some good posts for today that I think you will find interesting. I am trying to clean up and fix some outdated parts of the blog, taking full utilization of additional capacities of LeafletJS and web mapping services. I also played around with some 3D mapping, in part because I have bandwidth to burn through by Sunday. Apparently I was too careful with bandwidth over the month, and I’m going to end up throwing away some of it on my hotspot come the end of the 30 day period. Hard to believe that 30 days have come and gone since Christmas when my old plan expired.

Today will be mostly sunny 🌞, with a high of 22 degrees at 12pm. Not much movement on the mercury today. Nine degrees below normal. Blustery, with a northwest wind 13 to 21 mph, with gusts as high as 37 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had cloudy skies. The high last year was 37 degrees. The record high of 64 was set in 1906. 10.6 inches of snow fell back in 1963.❄

At one level I want to go for a walk out to Five Rivers 🐦but on the other hand it looks super cold with that wind. Maybe I should bundle up and not be a sissy and go out. I think my winter hat is still in my truck so it’s frigid, so I probably should get that and warm it up before I go out for my walk. The sun will certainly help.🌞 But first I want to take a shower and get cleaned up.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:08 pm with sun having an altitude of 28° from the due south horizon (-42.8° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 11.3 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 4:15 pm with the sun in the west-southwest (237°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-southwest (244°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 4:58 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 14 seconds with dusk around 5:27 pm, which is one minute and 16 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the Waxing Gibbous 🌔 Moon in the east-southeast (111°) at an altitude of 51° from the horizon, 250,570 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 6:03 pm. At sunset, look for partly sunny skies 🌃 and temperatures around 21 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 5. ☃️ Breezy, 21 mph breeze ⛅ from the west-northwest with gusts up to 37mph. Tomorrow will have 9 hours and 42 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 5 seconds over today.

Tonight will be mostly clear 🌃, with a low of 10 degrees at 5am. Four degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -7 at 5am; Northwest wind 15 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. In 2020, we had cloudy skies. It got down to 18 degrees. The record low of -17 occurred back in 1948. I turned up the heat last night before bed so it’s pretty comfortable but with the wind and lower temperatures, hard to know if it will keep up. Been better the past few years, although maybe that has a lot to do with the fact I keep it a bit warmer in my apartment then in years past. But also the heater is working better.

🌹🌻🌼Only 8 weeks remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌹🌻🌼 9 week left, 9 week left, take one down, pass it around, 8 weeks to spring left. Before you know it will be here, but stay warm for now.

As previously noted, there are 2 weeks until Save the Pine Bush Turns 43 🦋 when the sun will be setting at 5:15 pm with dusk at 5:45 pm. On that day in 2020, we had freezing rain and temperatures between 33 and 27 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 33 degrees. We hit a record high of 55 back in 1991.