Last Thursday evening, this was the view from one of the office windows.
Later that night, I took this photo. Or rather, these photos, since it’s a composite of two, one which picked up the herringbone pattern of the clouds and one which picked up the moon and the corona surrounding it.
It’s an amazingly clear day morning today. So clear that I suspect I saw part of the outline of Catalina Island off in the distance, between trees and buildings, on the drive to work. So clear that I decided to drive up to the park at Quail Hill in Irvine where I once spotted what I think thought was Downtown Los Angeles at a distance of ~40 miles (same as the “contrast” shot in last year’s Spring Haze post). And this time, I had a better camera.
First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context. This is looking northwest from the park. (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)
Everything’s flattened out near the horizon. Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.
Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.
I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy. It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution. Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.
Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles. What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect. But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.
It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.
Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines). If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it. And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40. Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).
Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.
Oddly, after a day sick in bed, doing dishes felt good because I was doing something. I got a lot of reading done, though.
I managed to get a few shots of the near-conjunction of the crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus tonight before they sank into the haze.
The first two shots were taken at twilight (well, dusk, really), around 5:05–5:10 PM PST, while the third was taken at 5:30, after night had fallen.
While driving toward the sun a little after 1:00 this afternoon, I noticed a faint reddish, slightly upturned patch in the sky ahead of me, and realized it was probably the bottom edge of a 22° sun halo. I was surprised, since the cloud cover looked too heavy for it, but it was there. At the next intersection, I looked out the side window to see if I could catch anything above the sun, and there was a clear arc running left of the sun, from a little below sun level to as high as I could see.
We stopped the car, found a tree to block the sun, and both looked. There was so much glare it was easier to see with sunglasses on, so I lent mine to Katie so she could catch it. Finally I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures, most of them using a gate post instead of the tree.
We ran some more errands, and I caught up with her at the grocery store. On my way from the car, I looked up and saw a perfect bright sundog to the right of the sun, much brighter than the clouds around it and showing the full red-to-blue spectrum. I should have gone back to the car for the better camera, but I used my phone camera instead, and got this shot.
I got to the edge of the lot just as Katie was leaving, and immediately said something like, “Look! Right above that palm tree!” Then I took off my sunglasses, realized that it was completely washed out without them (though it seems to have come out all right on my cheesy phone camera), and handed them over again. It continued to be visible, though less well-defined (it was a lot sharper than this photo shows) for at least half an hour.
A circle around the sun, and a bright rainbow-colored spot in the sky. I wonder how many people walking around never even noticed.
I tried out the Typealizer, which purports to analyze the text of a blog and determine the author’s personality type. Interestingly enough, it came up with different results depending on which of my blogs I pointed it to.
LiveJournal: ESTP – The Doers
K-Squared Ramblings: ESTJ – The Guardians (technically this one’s a group blog, but it looks like the tool only grabs the front page.)
Speed Force: ENTJ – The Executives
Opera Community blog: ISTP – The Mechanics
I seem to recall coming out as INTJ the last time I took the Myers-Briggs personality profile. The funny thing is that 3 of 4 classified me as extroverted. If you’ve ever met me in person, you know I’m not an extrovert.
