Chilmark voters will gather at a special town meeting tonight for a series of decisions on the much-discussed restoration project at Squibnocket Beach. Five of eight articles on the warrant relate to the project.

By many accounts, the blizzard that dropped 20-plus inches of snow and battered the coastline with hurricane-force winds was historic. Days after it first struck, the impact of the powerful two-day storm could still be felt throughout the Island.

Lights flickered out across the eastern part of the state at the height of the blizzard Tuesday, with power outages in every town on Cape Cod, and all of Nantucket going dark. By contrast, few outages were reported on the Vineyard during the first major snowstorm of the season.

The Island-owned energy cooperative, along with a partner, was awarded a provisional lease to develop an offshore wind farm in federal waters off the Vineyard.

The storm that battered the Vineyard this week began in the middle of the country as a small snowstorm known as an Alberta Clipper.

Two of the Earth’s nearest planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, appear in the western sky.