Thursday, December 31, 2015

Happy New Year!

Guess where I was New Year's Eve.


Here's hoping 2016 is a good one.

Shadows and Light

On the flight back from the Florida trip that provided the image for the last post, I noticed this out the airplane window:


Not one but two contrail shadows.  At different angles and converging on the anti-solar point. Curious, why would my plane have two contrail shadows?

Here is a shot that shows the two shadows against a thin layer of clouds, making them more obvious.


But wait there's more!


Hmmm ...

A clue:


Ignore the cloud bow and glory for a moment and look at the top of the image. Seems we were not the only plane in the sky that day.

Here's another clue:


Look closely on the left center of the image (click to bigafy). You can see the cloud shadows, which are also angled toward the anti-solar point.

So mystery solved. Contrails from the many planes that ply the eastern corridor along with shadows form the clouds, because of perspective all seeming to converge on the point, the anti-solar point.

Ok, now you can look at the glory.


Thursday, December 24, 2015

Flying Thru the Crown

Remember this post Flying Thru the Crown?

(You are reading it now ...)



It is an OPOD!

(If you are counting at home that's six OPODs.)

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Ice

Despite the high temperatures we've been having of late, last weekend was in the 70's and xmas eve is forecast to be close to 80!, we've still had some cold mornings.

And if the conditions are right overnight we get this:


Frost crystals growing on the deck railing.

Very cool to look at. Very hard to photograph.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

Webs

The morning after Thanksgiving I opened my front door and looked out over this.


Webs. 

Lots of webs.


Webs everywhere. Completely covering the front yard.


How many spiders? What species? 

Web (pun!) searches came up empty. There were links to a fungus, but the fungus was a summer phenomena. And to events in Texas and Australia. But nothing like I saw.


It happened just this one morning. A very foggy morning. But we've other foggy mornings before and since, with no webs.


It was very cool looking. Although I imagine it would creep some people out big time.