An amazing high tide at 8 am today of 6.7 feet above usual sea level.
Brown pelicans have had the Venice breakwater all to themselves for hours, as a series of islands. I've never seen pelicans sitting on these rocks before.
Note: A new documentary opening today about the hardships faced by pelicans from human changes to their habitats: Pelican Dreams by Judy Irving.
http://womensenews.org/story/arts/141106/pelican-dreams-flying-start-november-films#.VF1Y7fnF98E
The sea is flat as a bowl of jelly because the Santa Ana winds are blowing from land toward the ocean. No ocean-to-land breezes to start any waves.
Sand and sky, flat sea and footprints.
Palos Verdes Peninsula just a shadow, Los Angeles just a dream.
I discovered a star tonight: Fomalhaut... aka Fum al Hut (Arabic for "mouth of the fish").
I was at Point Dume, a volcanic intrusion, on Zuma Beach in Malibu about 6:30 pm.
Sitting at the base of the huge precipice of rock, I noticed a bright star in the thin gap between the cliff and a 30-foot boulder broken off the cliff.
I watched the star slowly slip to my right behind the boulder as Earth turned and wondered whether it was a star or a planet.
Later I stood up and walked to where I could see the whole southern sky. This star was very bright--1.2 magnitude, as I later learned, and it was the only one in that part of the sky.
With the light pollution from Los Angeles, I couldn't really see Scorpio or Sagitarrius or the Milky Way.
I saw one reddish star and thought it was Antares in Scorpio but later learned it was Mars. Scorpio had already slipped beneath the western horizon of the sea.
I could see Cygnus the swan and Aquila, the eagle, but east of them only this one unknown star.
Once I looked at the star map at home, I learned that Fomalhaut "lies in quite a barren region of the southern sky and because of this has become known as "The Solitary One" (The Nature Company Guides: Advanced Skywatching, p.269).
It's in Pisces Austrinus, which is down in the southern sky below Aquarius.
What a lovely time, nestled in a lap of volcanic rock, watching the stars and the waves, safe in the shadow of the mighty intrusion.
