Recently found Nuno Serrão via some Twitter posts. He’s an astrophotographer — meaning, a photographer who spends time looking at the skies and works to capture on film or magnetic or digital media the beauty and oddities that hover over our heads every day, and especially at night.
Oh, just look at this time lapse:
Astrophotography timelapse shot in Madeira Island on February 21st [2015]. Captured a lenticular cloud, Moon, Mars and Venus. [33,329 views as of November 16, 2018]
It’s only 7 seconds of video, covering perhaps 15 minutes of time, showing the action of the wind in forming the odd lenticular cloud stunningly painted by a setting sun.
Lenticular clouds don’t resemble the fluffy cumulus clouds of cartoons, and so are held suspect by hoax lovers, especially those enthralled by “chemtrails” hoaxes, who argue that clouds are sinister creations of mad scientists and government cabals. Because this short piece shows some of the actions of winds, I love it more.
True legend has it that an artist friend of physicist Richard Feynman told Feynman that scientists can’t be artists, because they know too much behind the scenes. Feynman answered that scientists have even more appreciation of beauty, the image of the flower and its aroma, and an understanding of the lengthy process by which a plant creates a blossom of beauty and sweet smell, to attract insects or humans to propagate new offspring for the plant.
Just your average spring day along the Wasatch Front in north Utah County, in Highland, Utah in Salt Lake County. Time lapse of the old mountains, and the clouds dancing around them as the sun goes down. A hint of the beauty the people of Utah live with every day — and that I hope they don’t take for granted!
It’s great there are so many electronic cameras around these days. A thousand times I’ve watched these things and lamented they couldn’t be captured. Mt. Timpanogos hides just the other side of that first line of mountains; if you know where to look, you can see its hulking shadow.
(When I lived in Utah County, this site was farmers’ fields, from here to the mountains.)
I was sad to discover most of my U.S. history students (juniors) didn’t know what an equinox is. So the autumnal equinox always offers a teaching moment that ticks off the teacher raters.
This is what an equinox looks like, from 2013 photos.
From Astronomy Picture of the Day: Earth at Equinox. From the Russian meteorological satellite Elektro-L
Explanation from NASA:
Equinox Earth Image Credit: Roscosmos / NTSOMZ / zelenyikot.livejournal.com
Courtesy: Igor Tirsky, Vitaliy Egorov Explanation: From a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, Russian meteorological satellite Elektro-L takes high-resolution images our fair planet every 30 minutes. But only twice a year, during an Equinox, can it capture an image like this one, showing an entire hemisphere bathed in sunlight. At an Equinox, the Earth’s axis of rotation is not tilted toward or away from the Sun, so the solar illumination can extend to both the planet’s poles. Of course, this Elektro-L picture was recorded on September 22nd [2013], at the northern hemisphere’s autumnal equinox. For a moment on that date, the Sun was behind the geostationary satellite and a telltale glint of reflected sunlight is seen crossing the equator, at the location on the planet with satellite and sun directly overhead (5MB animated gif).
Wait. Animated .gif? Cool!
The Earth at equinox, 2013; from Russan space program, via NASA.
You do discuss equinoxes in your social studies classes, right? A good time to break out the globes and flashlights, and let the students discover how it works.
The autumnal equinox is at 8:22 GMT or 4:22 am EDT on Wednesday. The two satellite images below from the European Meteosat show the sun angle on Earth from June 22 near the summer solstice and then today at the same time. Notice the sun angle has changed dramatically, and the High Arctic is no longer seeing 24 hour daylight.
It was clear this morning, but the snow started just before 9. It’s predicted to warm up enough that the stuff from the skies will be wet, but the ground will be stay frozen. Ice storm.
Businesses and schools shut down about noon.
Two male house finches, probably in their first year, try to eat enough to stay warm on a snowy day in Dallas. Photo by Ed Darrell
Something about snow makes the birds hungry. A tube feeder we filled last night emptied by noon.
At home we refill the feeders as best we can.
Rewards are high. We’ve had six species in the yard at any time, all morning, and at least eight species total.
A sparrow — a chipping sparrow juvenile? — acting as scout to find food; it was joined by at least two companions after dusting snow off of seeds in the feeder, and finding them suitable.
Wrens (probably Carolina, but they won’t come close to the house)
It would be nice if our downy woodpecker friends would visit, but they’ve been scarce most of the fall.
Where are the titmice?
As usual, we have some vireo or other (Bell’s, I think), but it knows us well enough to be able to sing to get us excited, but appear only when humans are not looking.
How are things in your yard?
We get the goldfinches in winter, with their winter colors; some of the males may be anticipating spring a bit.
Female cardinal and male house finch await their turn at the small bird feeder.
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Enough of the jokes about how nature makes Dallas beautiful by covering everything up.
There were some nice views of Dallas today, with the fog, though.
From WFAA-TV’s tower camera, just before sunrise:
Dallas in the fog, December 9, 2014; photo from WFAA-TV’s tower camera.
This photo produced the most stir, I think. Terry Maxon posted it at his Aviation Blog with the Dallas Morning News:
Maxon wrote: “Mike Alvstad was flying into Dallas/Fort Worth on Tuesday morning and took a photo as his flight from Tampa, Fla., passed south and west of downtown Dallas. He shared it with Lee Evans, who shared it with us, and we liked it a lot.”
In the sea of clouds, you can see the top of Reunion Tower a bit lower to the right. There’s the wedge-topped Fountain Place in the lower center of the downtown cluster. Off to the left by itself is Cityplace, we believe.
Note that even though we could barely see a block ahead of us at ground level, the skyscrapers are casting shadows on the top of the fog clouds.
You want to see what it looked like from the upper floors of those buildings? Kathryn’s office is below the clouds. When I worked in the high floors of the old Ling/Temco/Vought Building (now Trammell Crow Tower, I think) we didn’t have cell phones with cameras, and electronic imaging was in its commercialized infancy. I never had the old 35mm film cameras with me on those few occasions when we rode the elevators up out of the fog, and could almost wave to someone in the tower across the way. Justin Turveen got off a few shots today, but is being stingy with the photos at his flickr site. Check it out if you wish.
It was foggy across the area starting last night, including Denton, which is home to the University of North Texas and Texas Women’s University:
Photo by Samantha Irene Balderas, at the campus of the University of North Texas (UNT), December 8, 2014
Jeff Rogers got a sunrise in McKinney, through the fog:
Sunrise through fog in McKinney, Texas. Photo by Jeff Rogers
Angelica Villalobos Yates surprised a tree in the Texas fog.
Toni Wolff Margolis caught birds on a wire in the fog.
From the tall buildings in downtown Dallas, a shot by Cindy Ackerson Bivins:
Photo from the Bank of America Tower of other Dallas buildings in the fog, December 9, 2014. Photo by Cindy Ackerson Bivins
Mike Prendergrast at Aerial DFW.com sent his DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus Drone to work, rising above the clouds, with good results, I think. He had me when I read that he included some time-lapse in there . . .
(Yes, Prendergrast is a great guy, and a good photographer, and he followed the rules and stayed low and out of the way of aircraft.)
Do you have a nice shot of Dallas in the fog to share? Send it to me, or post it in comments.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Suzy Bangs, who I hope is joining us again this week to take a hot Christmas meal and cheer to the good people at the Pleasant Grove Senior Recreation Center (that’s Pleasant Grove, Texas). Thanks, too, for the splash from Dubious Quality (who is this Gilbert fellow?).
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Photo from the Dallas Karting Complex. Dallas, evening of March 27, 2014. Photographer unidentified. David Worthington.
Funny thing is, this photo probably didn’t require much processing to look like this. Advances in lighting, especially LEDs and color, mean that Dallas’s skyline can look much like this any night.
Just add a thunderhead to the northeast, and voila!
From Twitter today; working to track down more details.
A photo by John C. Olsen, taken in Hastings, Nebraska, perhaps on December 31, 2013:
From Fascinating Pics: One of the rarest weather phenomena, Mammatus Clouds. Photo taken by John C. Olsen in Hastings, NE pic.twitter.com/dlPNaPa25D
Our boys liked clouds from the start. A couple of our early cloud identification books featured mammatus clouds (guess where the name came from); and before each boy was 11, we had seen these clouds here in Texas, often in that treacherous time known as tornado season.
Mammatus Cloudssagging pouch-like structuresMammatus are pouch-like cloud structures and a rare example of clouds in sinking air.
Sometimes very ominous in appearance, mammatus clouds are harmless and do not mean that a tornado is about to form; a commonly held misconception. In fact, mammatus are usually seen after the worst of a thunderstorm has passed.
As updrafts carry precipitation enriched air to the cloud top, upward momentum is lost and the air begins to spread out horizontally, becoming a part of the anvil cloud. Because of its high concentration of precipitation particles (ice crystals and water droplets), the saturated air is heavier than the surrounding air and sinks back towards the earth.
The temperature of the subsiding air increases as it descends. However, since heat energy is required to melt and evaporate the precipitation particles contained within the sinking air, the warming produced by the sinking motion is quickly used up in the evaporation of precipitation particles. If more energy is required for evaporation than is generated by the subsidence, the sinking air will be cooler than its surroundings and will continue to sink downward.
The subsiding air eventually appears below the cloud base as rounded pouch-like structures called mammatus clouds.
Mammatus are long lived if the sinking air contains large drops and snow crystals since larger particles require greater amounts of energy for evaporation to occur. Over time, the cloud droplets do eventually evaporate and the mammatus dissolve.
Our experience is the clouds look a lot cooler than can be captured on film or in electronic images. Mr. Olsen captured a great image.
Very nice shot
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With all the cameras around, if everybody just points their own camera to the skies and starts shooting, we’ll get some good shots.
Tonight the Texas Storm Chasers sent this one out:
Texas Storm Chasers @TxStormChasers 27m RT @TaylorKLynn: @TxStormChasers Took these from my phone of the storm heading into northern Lubbock! pic.twitter.com/5LQX1qBWsN #txwx
Looks like “Night on Storm Prairie” to me. (Where’s Disney when you need em?)
Shot with a camera phone, I’m guessing from inside a hotel (are those reflections in the window?). Not sure who shot it, so I’ve just credited “Texas Storm Chasers.”
“Main Street Buffalo” – Looking down Main Street of Buffalo, Oklahoma as a severe thunderstorm dumping large hail sits nearly stationary just north of town. I’ve been wanting to get a scene like this for a long time. This was still in the late afternoon and it looked like evening outside, the locals were wondering why I’d keep running out in the middle of the road in between traffic with my camera one guy stopped to ask us if we were broke down. Great people!
You see a few of these skies in a week, you’re not so anxious to stand outside and deny global warming caused by humans. With luck, enough people will be driven to repent of their denialism, and we can get some serious action to restore the atmosphere.
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Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
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Dead Link?
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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