Hello, as you can see the four of us spent Christmas together this year. With Anika living in Brighton and James in Austin, and us in Ireland for a while, this has not happened for a few years now. Christmas weather in the Portland area is usually not spectacular. Instead of watching the heavy clouds and rain here, we unpacked our presents in the morning and headed for the coast in the afternoon to watch the rain there falling into the Ocean.
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| Venus on Christmas |
We got to the house we rented just South of Newport just in time for the sunset and a pretty clear view of the night sky. Our neighbor had some bright porch lights on and the humidity was very high. Also, this is not the season to take Milky Way pictures, but I had to try anyway since it is seldom that we get clear nights here.
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| Winter Milky Way and Andromeda in the upper left |
The next day we visited the
Yaquina Bay and
Yaquina Head lighthouses and saw some of the animals in the natural area there. Some of the pictures turned out OK. You can see all of them in my Flickr
album for this trip.
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| Yaquina Bay lighthouse |
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| Yaquina Head lighthouse |
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| A bald eagle watching the visitors to Yquina Head lighthouse |
I had my 300 mm lens with me to capture the eagle above. In hindsight, I should have gone back to the car and get the 500 mm lens. We also saw some seals down at the pebble beach, but no gray whales, even though this is supposed to be whale watch week. Other than the good day we had right after Christmas, visibility was pretty bad and the waves were huge with sneaker waves warnings in effect. No gray whales for us. James thought it was a scam to attract tourists to the coast during Winter months ;-)
We did get a decent sunset, though, on the day after Christmas.
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| Sunset with Yaquina Head lighthouse in the background |
We now have seen all lighthouses on the central and Northern Oregon coast. There are a few more in the South we need to visit. I have a good picture of Heceta lighthouse from our Florence trip in August, but have not had time to post thos pictures yet. Stay tuned!
