I'd be grateful if you could remember us in your prayers as I ebark upon the uncertain waters ahead.  One great thing, I'll no longer have to worry about all my retired friends calling me up and interrupt me every day asking when I'm going to retire.  In the meantime, here's some important things I hope you'll all consider:

The Heartland Self-Reliance Conference (THSRC)

I'm honored to have been invited to participate in THSRC on May 15-16, 2026 in Millersburg, Ohio.  I will be giving presentations on natural methods of telling time and finding direction from the Sun, Moon and stars.  We will also have a booth selling our books.  I'm VERY EXCITED for an opportunity to address this gathering of homesteaders and preppers, two groups who will hopefully be interested in methods of celestial timekeeping and navigation as had been known and practiced down through all pre-industrial history, yet forgotten in our high tech world.  And most homesteaders and preppers are also homeschoolers, so this should be a perfect fit for the message of Classical Astronomy.  If you live in Ohio, or if you're of a mind to travel, please attend this conference, and spread the word to all your friends.

Brownstone Retreat 2026

I'm also excited to announce the second annual Brownstone Retreat coming up on August 28-29, 2026 at Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia.   We were so blessed to attend the 2025 retreat and made several new friends.  If you're not familiar, the Brownstone Institute is a think tank mostly for academic and professional refugees who got "cancelled" during covid for expressing opinions contrary to the accepted narrative.  Brownstone hosted the Great Barrington Declaration by Dr. Jay Battacharia and his colleagues, and he is now the NIH director under Trump.  Brownstone's current goals include MAHA, medical freedom and American freedom in general.  A lot of Christians are involved in Brownstone, though the group is not explictly Christian.  I visit the Brownstone Journal site every day to read the articles.  Hope you'll join us at the 2026 retreat. 

Harry Chronis, "True Religion," Post-COVID

Harry is a pastor in Arizona.  We met Harry and Karen at the 2025 Brownstone Retreat.   Harry is doing some important writing at "True Religion," Post COVID on Substack chronicling his own family's tragic covid experience and encouraging Christians to do the same.  We need to not forget what happened ago and be vigilant lest the bad guys try again to undermine our freedom.  I encourage you to read Harry's COVID Manifesto for Christians, a detailed summary of everything we endured 5-6 years ago during that episode.  Also visit Harry's Substack and especially this post to which I contributed a lengthy comment.  I've created a Substack and plan to post my non-astronomy writing to that site, to have an online archive that I hope might remain available after I'm gone.        

Back Up The Seasonal Hill

Up till now I've had an unfortunate tendency of not writing a newsletter for a long time and then writing a jumbo length newsletter, longer than anyone cares to read.  Sorry about that!  Hope to mitigate that tendency now that I'm retired from the old day job.  

As explained in this newsletter from last July, the apparent movement of the Sun along the ecliptic circle is responsible for the lengthening and shortening of the length of daylight over the seasons of the year.  The length of daylight goes "up and down the seasonal hill" following the path of a sine wave.  The path is flat around the solstices -- up on the hilltop around the summer solstice and down in the valley around the winter solstice.  For this reason, the lengths of daylight do not change much for a month on either side of these seasonal extremes.

However, in the current month of February, the length of daylight has begun to "climb the seasonal hill" out of the valley of winter darkness as the Sun ascends to higher declinations in the sky.   

As a result of the increase in declination, the Sun is higher and higher in the noon sky each passing day while the Sun rises earlier and sets later.  Here are some sample sunrise/sunset times for Cleveland, Ohio from the Time and Date website.  (Use this site to find the times for your home town):

Note how the sunrise/sunset times shift by an hour in March due to Daylight Savings Time.  Subtract and hour from the numbers above to get a clearer idea of the daylight progression.  In any event, artificial shifting notwithstanding, we can expect the period of daylight to increase dramatically over the next month.  

Also note the rapid progression in noon elevation from now until the vernal equinox, the first day of spring as shown on the analemma, as explained in this recent newsletter and also this one:   

These phenomena are among the easiest things to observe in life, for FREE without any instruments or software or anything else.  Just pay attention and observe over the passing days and weeks.  And yet hardly NO ONE today bothers to notice, even though all of this was commonplace in pre-industrial early America, when everyone read the Farmer's Almanacks.   

I'm planning to use the increasing daylight as an opportunity to rise earlier and regularly observe the sunrise in the hopes of finally establishing a healthy circadian rhythm as explained in this newsletter from last year. We're also looking forward to having time for gardening and otherwise being oudoors on a sunny day in the LORD's beautiful creation!

February 2026 -- Four Even Weeks

In common years like 2026, February has 28 days, which is exactly four weeks.  However, February, 2026 is unusual in that it began on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, thus consisting of four even weeks.  This interesting calendar alignment occurs 11 times per century, or about every 9 years on average.  

In the 21st century, this happened (or will happen) in 2009, 2015, 2026, 2037, 2043, 2054, 2064, 2071, 2082, 2093 and 2099.  These are all years that begin with the Domincal Letter "D" according to the computistic reckoning of the Gregorian Calendar.  The Dominical Letter system was explained in a previous newsletter and will be included in Measuring the Heavens, the long awaited sequel to our Signs & Seasons, homeschool astronomy curriculum, which will hopefully be completed now that I finally have the time.  

Lake Erie Ice

The winter of '26 has certainly been memorable with Polar Vortexes, Bomb Cyclones, the Blizzard of '26, and generally colder temps and more snow that usual across the USA.  I had the opportunity to go skiing, which I'd not done in maybe 15 years.  This was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my first time skiing as a high school freshman in January, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial.  (Wow, that half century sure went quick!)  Anyway, it was a blast, just like riding a bike, even as an old geezer.

Here in Cleveland we had a 453 hour continous stretch of temps below freezing, almost 19 straight days from January 22 to February 10. This is the 10th longest such freeze snap in Cleveland history, with the record being the infamous winter of 1977.  That year the freeze lasted 912 hours, a whole 38 straight days below freezing, which included the entire month of January.  Even more memorable, during that stretch, 19 days straight were below zero!  I was in 10th grade and stood shivering at the bus stop each morning when the bus was 45 minutes late.  I could tell you some stories about that winter.  We were so sick of being cold. 

Anyway, during this winter, the ice-encrusted shores of the Great Lakes were even more ice-encrusted than usual.  Here's a satellite pic from Febuary 4, 2026 showing Lake Erie nearly frozen at 96%, the first time this has happened since 1996.  Cleveland is down there somewhere amidst that white landscape. 

On Saturday, February 7, Mrs. Ryan and I went down to Edgewater to inspect the lake condition.  As you can see, the entire lakeshore at that location was a solid sheet of ice.  Maybe a hundred people were out taking a stroll on the frozen lake.  One guy was riding a bike.  In the 1950s, 60s and 70s we used to always hear stories of people riding snowmobiles and even cars out onto the lake.  But winters have been warmer in recent decades and some winters the lake has been ice-free. 

Readers of our Moonfinder children's book will recognize the horizon line from the left pic above.  Well anyway, we should be old enough to know better, but with so many people out on the frozen lake, Mrs. Ryan suggested we take a stroll ourselves.  This is only the second time I've done that in my life.  But out in the open with no trees or buildings, that wind comes whistling something fierce!  We got some nice pix from unlikely camera angles, being away from the shore.  But my hands got so cold, so quick, that it felt like my fingers could snap off!  

I thought about coming back with my bike and taking a detailed tour of the city from the frozen lake surface.  But that very next day, February 8, an 80 mile long crack opened up on Lake Erie.  So I made the mature and sensible decision to stay ashore and leave the recklessness to the kids!

This crack no doubt formed in response to all the sunny winter days we'd been having.  Though the air temperature was still cold, the daily sunshine still shone down upon the lake surface.  And with the increasing daylight in February, as explained above, the Sun was higher in the sky and shining for more hours than a month earlier in January.  

Roughly speaking, the Sun radiates about 1000 watts per square yard which is variably distributed over the Earth's curved surface.  Lake Erie has a surface area of almost 10,000 square miles, which is more than 30 BILLION square yards.  In spite of the cold temps, there's something like 30 TRILLION watts of solar energy shining down on the frozen surface of Lake Erie on a sunny day!  While most of that energy will reflect and reradiate back up into the sky, some portion of it gets absorbed into the ice, which likely contributed to the crack, in addition to pressure above and below the ice from the strong winds and the prevailing lake current of water heading toward Niagara Falls. 

After the cold snap broke, we had a really pleasant thaw with temps in the 50s and 60s.  There was a couple feet of snow on the ground that all melted and turned the frozen snowscape to mud.  But then the weather turned cold again with hard driving winds.  So we went back to Edgewater two weeks after our lake walk, Saturday, February 21, and observed a very different scene.  The ice pack was completely gone with only some slush and small ice floes close to the shore.  The lake was a murky greenish-brown with waves driving hard against the rocky shoreline.  No doubt some of the ice melted but the hard wind broke up the pack and blew the chunks away from shore, probably across to Canada or down to Buffalo.     

The cold temps returned and we got some more snow, but winter's grasp is now weakening with the longer sunlight.  I went back to Edgewater on Wednesday, February 25, only four days later.  The wind and currents must have carried some of the ice back and large floes were visible.  The lake surface looked solid and all the chunks appeared frozen together.  But no one was attempting to stoll on the ice this time and there ain't no way I was gonna try it!  Lake Erie is an ongoing source of fascination, a mercurial, ever-changing body of water, with many moods and facets throughout the year.

What's Up With The Moon

So last week on February 18 I was on my way to hang out with The Cranky Arborist™ when I witnessed an AMAZING Moon.  It was a spooky looking hairline crescent, only about a 1 day old Moon, just barely hanging above the treeline.  Really cool sight.  And just above it was a little spark which I confirmed to be Mercury.  Now you don't always get to see Mercury, it's a very difficult object to spot, not too bright and always low to the horizon.  But I found out it was near its maximum eastern elongation, which means it was farthest above the sunset horizon. This was a very close conjunction of the Moon and Mercury, and I just stumbled upon it unawares.  So it just goes to show that you should ALWAYS be looking at the sky, and don't wait for me to write about it beforehand in the newsletter!  You never know what you might see!

Keep your eye on the waxing crescent Moon in the days following the New Moons of March 18 and April 17 as we are entering the season of the Smile Moon as explained in this 2010 edition of this newsletter.  This is a special configuration of the ecliptic that only occurs in the spring, making the evening crescents more visible than at other months of the year.  This is also an old farmer's "sign" of the coming of spring, as had been known down through cenuries of pre-industrial history.      

Keep your eye on the Moon this week as it will pass by the bright planet Jupiter on the evenings of February 26 and 27.  If you're not familiar with finding this planet, you can't miss Jupiter as it is in Gemini, high above Orion, and the brightest object after the Moon currently in the evening sky.

In other news, the even brighter planet Venus is FINALLY back in the evening sky.  Look to the western sky after sunset in coming weeks and months to catch a glimpse.  In its current apparition as the Evening Star, Venus will soon be hard to miss, a very conspicuous object in dusk twilight.  

I created a table of Moon phases for 2026 especially to help readers of our  Moonfinder storybook find the Moon with their kids.  Drop me an email if you would like a PDF copy of this to help keep track of the current location of the Moon, whether or not you've read the storybook.

There will be a total eclipse of the Moon visible from North America before sunrise on the morning of Tuesday, March 3, 2026.  This eclipse will favor the western USA and Canada where the entire event will be visible.  Totality begins at 6:04 AM EST, which is the same as 5:04 AM CST, 4:04 AM MST and 3:04 AM PST.  The ingress partial phase begins 45 minutes beforehand and totality lasts for about an hour, followed by an egress partial phase of an hour and a quarter.  Yeah, I know, these are rude hours of the morning for most people.  But if you happen to be up walking the dog before daylight in your area and if the sky is clear, be sure to take a look, even for a minute.  Let me know if you see anything.