Ain't no sunshine

The sun came out long enough to make a Sun Dog.



Still no garden planted. Too wet. We were under three miserable inches of rain this weekend. Last year it would have been a blessing — this year it's just increasingly annoying.

The forecast is for at least 3 days of sun though, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

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The temperature dropped so low last night that the heat came on at 1:23 am. I know the time, because the smoke alarm was also roused (presumably just from dust). In the hour+ that it took me to fall back asleep, I wondered if I should create a "grab and go" drawer of important things that I wouldn't want to get burned up. I was secretly proud that my purse and cell phone had been within arm's reach. (But not my computer.)

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My new words for the week:
Chatoyancy
Nixtamalization

With parakeet accompaniment

It was more spectacular before I thought to grab the camera, of course.



I grew up hearing this called sheet lightning or heat lightning, but to be correct I think it's actually called intra-cloud lightning.

I didn't realize, until playing it back, how loudly the frogs out in the pond were singing. And inside, you can hear Beaker (our parakeet, aka budgie) squawking, whistling, and talking. At around 11-12 seconds he says, "crazy bird". You'll have to have your ears pricked and the sound turned up to hear it.

Sundogs

How I managed to live (mumble, mumble) years being unaware of sundogs, I'm not sure.



It's been two years since I first saw one (and wrote about it), and I've seen dozens since.



But I still haven't managed to get a good photo of one.

I see them more often in winter, especially when driving south late in the afternoon. (AL-75S gives great sundog.)

No use trying to race them home, though. They're slithery, and don't hang around for portraits.

Here's a nice, simple page with a good sundog photo, as well as other atmospheric phenomena. Here is the definitive page on the science behind the "why" of all the optics.

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The latest I and the Bird is up over at The Birder's Report. Go see!

Luna Noctiluca

The moon illusion doesn't work very well here.

We're in a valley, and Selene is already well on her journey before she rises over the mountain.

The clouds played hide-and-seek, and it was all quite lovely anyway.

The moment the first shiny diamond chip of a moon slipped over the top of the trees, it was as if a cue had been given, and coyotes began howling in the distance. Chillbumps and laughter!

I suspect the show continued all night, but we slept through it.



We woke just in time to see her making way for Eos and Helios, early this morning.

Luna luna

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
-Sylvia Plath



The moon's an arrant thief,
and her pale fire she snatches from the sun...
-Shakespeare



I see the moon
and the moon sees me.
-Nursery rhyme

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It was cloudy most of the time, but every now and then we got a few nice glimpses of the lunar eclipse last night. Or as one of my friends calls it, the Moonar Clipse.

Clouds were ok though, since it meant that we got lots of rain, lovely rain, today.

Me & my baby view the eclipse

We got up early to view the lunar eclipse. Clouds came and went, and there was a bit of fog, but overall it was a nice show.








When it was gone, baby it was gone. Zero, zip, total darkness.


Captivating corona.


By the dark of the moon.

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I've been wanting to use that headline for such a long time. (It's the title of a book I've been meaning to read. It's only been 16 years -- maybe I'll get to it soon.)

No show

We didn't have much luck viewing the meteors. (We never do, we don't stay up that late.)



So I played around with the camera a while. I call this an artistic amount of blurriness.



That's not really a street sign, it says "old fisherman crossing". I would've taken it down, but Hubby likes it.

Birmingham, or Centerpoint at least, is in the direction of that glow in the sky.

Sun Halo

On the 10th we saw something in the way of atmospheric optics...



...but it was very difficult to photograph. (Still no new camera yet, by the way. I remain frozen by indecision.)

Edited portion follows


The pictures were perhaps too subtle. I've added this over-enhanced photo. (Can you see me now?) The arc is a pale upside-down rainbow that begins 2/3 down the left side of the picture and sweeps over to the larger cloud mass at right.
Maybe you had to be there.



I couldn't identify which particular effect this was. 22° halo? 46° halo? Something else (Supralateral arc)? I suspect a 22° halo, mainly because it's the most common. But this wasn't as bright or as colorful as those sound.



Here is the same picture with the contrast enhanced. It looked so much cooler in person.

The details: Near Oneonta, Alabama. Around 10:00 - 11:00 am, sun at about 45° angle to horizon (so, not a Supralateral arc then, since they only form at 32° or less). With the camera at 35mm I could not get them both in the picture. (But I wasn't too far from it, which also makes me think 22° halo.)

I read and read at the wonderful Atmospheric Optics web page. (I kept confusing myself.) I posted on a weather forum but got no answers.

Note to self for next time:
Edge of halo one outstetched hand (at arm's length) from sun: 22° halo.
Two outstretched hands: 46° halo.

Also difficult to photograph was this recent cloudbow.



Oh the fuzziness.

Puffed sky

Puffed sky

Sorry for not being here. I still can't sit for long periods of time without my back letting me know (via little shooting pains down my right leg) that I shouldn't.

Not much has happened. The night of a thousand sleep interruptions was followed by the morning of entirely too much caffeine. Complete with hand tremors! (I hummed TMBG's Lie Still Little Bottle all day long.)

I had finally gone to the doctor, and came home with three little orange bottles. (I was reminded that I am really and truly an adult when I can say things like, "Please give me a shot.") I'd thought muscle relaxers always enduced drowsiness, but the original brand of horse pills he prescribed put such a hair trigger on my sleep that I had to call and beg for something else. Near-total deprivation of REM sleep might not necessarily turn me into a serial killer, but I wasn't willing to experiment. The new ones are tiny, and leave me a bit loopy, so if none of this makes any sense, that's why.

Canada Geese have seemed restless, honking their way across the property several times a day, and even at night, which was new for me. Maybe I just slept through it all before.


Puffed sky at sunset with river of grackles (click to enlighten)

Sun dog

When I was researching heiligenschein recently, I also read about Sun dogs a.k.a. parhelia or false suns. I'd heard the term but had never seen the phenomenon, although it's apparently not rare.

OK, so if sundogs are fairly common, I should start seeing them once I started looking for them, right?

Yep.



Sun dog!



Cool.

It looked much brighter in person. There are usually two, spaced evenly on either side, about 22º away and at the same altitude as the sun. I couldn't see the twin on the other side, even when I moved to a vantage point without trees. The clouds on that side looked different. Thicker.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a rainbow, or rather cloudbow. It looked like the lower arc in this picture, with the addition of a bright white spot just to the left. We were almost home from the grocery store, but by the time I rushed in to grab the camera, the long "bow" portion of the parhelic arc had vanished, and never returned. The sun dog got brighter and dimmer as the clouds shifted.

I was a happy camper.

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Parhelia are formed by light passing through horizontal hexagonal plate ice crystals in the clouds. Certain types of clouds produce them more often, and they are most often seen when the sun is low. (See here.)

Another good site for atmospheric optics:
http://www.meteoros.de/indexe.htm

Waterlog sunset

On New Year's Eve there was a beautiful foggy sunset.



This was the same night of the moon corona.



The later it grew, the cooler and foggier it became.



I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like it before.

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I once lived on the tenth floor of a dormitory that overlooked a cemetery. I thought it was a terrible view and a poor trick to play on freshmen, until I noticed the sun go down. The view to the horizon was nearly completely flat, so every sunset was a treat.

Moon corona

The moon corona from New Year's Eve. (Note also the moonlight-induced lens flare at lower right.)

Birmingham TV news stations were reportedly flooded with calls (from people who apparently only go outside at night to watch fireworks) asking, "What is that strange thing going on with the moon?!"

It was an interesting sunset that evening too -- I'll post those pics soon.

Rayleigh Scattering

Changes in directions of electromagnetic energy by local variations in refractive index caused by the presence of dispersed species whose size is 1/16 wavelength or less than the wavelength of the incident light.

It's also just pretty.

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Why the sky is blue and sunsets are red, references here and here.

Time slipping

3/1 Update: I said below that we'd be on the Azalea aisle at this weekend's show. To be more specific (since there will apparently be two soapmakers on that row): Azalea 1204.



We've got a craft show coming up and life is hectic, so blog posting may be light or nonexistant for a week or so.



The show is Cottontails, at the Civic Center in downtown Birmingham - come see us! We'll be downstairs on the "Azalea" aisle.

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Check out the Friday Ark for your weekly critter fix.

Look Up

quilted sky


waxwing ornaments

Cue the Hallelujah Chorus

There was a small problem with my business toll-free number.

It's fixed.

Some crazy company is still publishing my number as theirs, although apparently not as widely, so the spate of calls from irate Walgreens stores has slowed to a trickle.

And I'm no longer being charged $1 a minute for the insane answering machine ravings of people who don't understand the part where I say "You've reached Natural Impulse Handmade Soap" instead of "This is That Other Company Who Ripped You Off" at the start of the message. (I finally had to just unplug it.)

And it's finally ringing to the right number.

I could have sworn that I heard a little angels' rejoicing.

Mooning

"Wow," said some rich person who happened upon this blog via strange googling, "if she had that fancy $8000 Canon digital camera, I'll bet her photos of the moon would look a lot better."

The anonymous rich person, in a display of uncharacteristic generosity, ordered the camera straightaway and had it sent to the poor blogger.

There was much rejoicing.

And then I woke up.

Vapor trails

While walking near the swamp, we saw some contrail reflections among the branches.






Later, the sunset made them look like angry cuts.