The moon waxes through evening skies this week, reaching full phase Wednesday. Look for it just a few degrees to the west of Mars Saturday. The next night it is flanked with Mars to the right and Spica even closer to its left. Tuesday the near-full moon is five degrees to the right of Saturn and 10 degrees to the left Wednesday. The moon is so bright, you’ll have to hunt for the ringed planet.     This is Saturn’s best appearance, as the planet reaches opposition,...

I never considered myself the cruise-ship type until I woke up in a luxurious cabin well below 60 degrees south latitude — in Antarctica. The view out the window was so bright and dazzling that I might have been staring at ­heaven, for I could not look too long.     After watching Cape Horn disappear the night before, I had fallen asleep as we clove grey seas into thick fog. Now the curtain had parted to reveal this icy Shangri-La, a splendor of mountains and ice...

As the spring sky was brightening, Roy completed his checklist of the readiness of the trailored boat in his driveway. On board were life jackets, flares, fire extinguishers, paddles, a whistle, flags and flares.     The boat, another used yet unnamed craft, was a 19-foot aluminum V-hull runabout with an 80-horsepower engine, an engine that seemed to work fine when he tested it. Roy hadn’t boated for a while, but when his son Kevin called from Iraq saying he’d really...

It was late October when I launched my kayak from Jackson Landing into the Patuxent River. I wondered what I would find during the lull between migrations. The osprey had already settled into their South American winter quarters, the ducks and swans were still on their way from northern shores. September’s abundance of wildflowers had faded; only remnants of purple asters remained, the rest gone crunchy and brown. A light breeze whisked the wild rice, but the water was mirror flat,...