Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 17m 39s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1987, Vincent van Gogh‘s painting, the Le Pont de Trinquetaille, is bought for $20.4 million at an auction in London, England.
Wisconsin is a place of natural beauty, and our evening skies when properly dark display that beauty in fine detail. Madeline Heim reports A Driftless Region county is aiming to be a new frontier in protecting Wisconsin’s darkest skies:
When people think of the world’s darkest skies, those are the places they’re picturing. Massive expanses of natural beauty unobstructed by city lights, such as the national parks that dot the American West, or islands in the middle of the ocean.
But today, [Scott] Lind is helping bring recognition to dark skies much closer to home.
He’s part of a team that will soon petition the International Dark Sky Association to designate three Driftless Region properties — the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, Wildcat Mountain State Park and Tunnelville Cliffs State Natural Area — as an international dark sky park.
The association, which began its dark sky places program in 2001 to recognize “excellent stewardship of the night sky,” has most of its U.S. parks scattered out west, in Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, Zion and Joshua Tree, to name a few.
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Few are in the Midwest, and Wisconsin has just one: Newport State Park, at the tip of Door County on the shores of Lake Michigan, which has had the designation for five years.
Moose Protects Calves From Bear Attack: