So much of one’s time in Hawaii is spent looking up, or out. Up to the sky, or out to where the sky meets the sea.
And there’s a rainbow almost every day.
In Buffalo, I might get to see a rainbow three or four times a year. In Hawaii, there were rainbows almost every day. I’d get up, make coffee, go to the balcony to greet the morning, look to the right (west) to the rain clouds descending (and breaking up) from the mountains, and…rainbows.
And then there were the sunsets, and the lingering light once the sun was down:
On this trip, the planets got into the act. Here, from top to bottom, are Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus:
One morning I was awake quite early, so I got up at 6:00am…just in time to see Orion setting. Orion is a winter constellation, which I associate with the colder times of year…which of course this is, even in Hawaii, though it doesn’t seem like it.
The most magical skyward sight of all, though, was something I’d never seen before, something I don’t even think I knew was possible until late one night, on a drizzly evening, The Wife and I both saw it at the same time: a moonbow. Though we didn’t see much of the moon on our trip, because we were mostly facing south so its path through the Hawaiian sky was mostly behind us and out of view from our south-facing balcony, there was a full moon while we were there, and on that night its light was bright enough to shine through the water droplets in the air. The result was this:
Hawaii is quite a place for those of us who find magic in the sky….
