One of the things we have to consider when planning our walks is when it actually gets dark. There are three times of evening twilight:
- Civil twilight – When the sun has dipped to about 6 degrees below the horizon. At this point, you can still see well enough to do stuff without a light.
- Nautical twilight – This is when it’s dark enough to need a light to see things, and is about when we plan to start our night walks.
- Astronomical twilight – At this time, it’s fully dark and the stars are visible to the naked eye.
To find these times, we use an app called LunaSolCal (Android, Apple). It provides a lot of information about what’s going on in the sky.
Another consideration is how full the moon is. Scorpions naturally shun moonlight, so we try to plan walks when the moon is not full so we have the opportunity to see as many scorpions as possible. We’ve been out when the moon is full, and we still see some, but when it’s bright, many scorpions tend to hide under the pine bark and deep in the cracks of wood.