Phone needs food badly!
My entry for this week’s Flickr Friday photo challenge on the theme, “Hungry.”
Category: Life
Rainbow Cloud
I noticed the halo around the sun as soon as I walked out the door for lunch on Thursday. The rainbow cloud? That appeared as I walked past a building. I saw it as soon as the southern sky came into view again.
The colors got more intense over the next few minutes, and I kept taking photos until my phone locked up. I stood there watching the colors intensify, then fade, while I pulled out the battery and waited for the phone to reboot.
A man who’d been sitting nearby, buried in his phone, looked up wondering what I was taking pictures of. He’d never seen anything like it before, and wondered what it was, and fortunately I was able to answer.
At the right angle, ice crystals in a cirrus cloud refract sunlight to produce a feathery rainbow effect. The circumhorizon arc runs parallel to the horizon, and while it can be long, it’s usually only seen in fragments like this. I’ve only seen a few of these myself, and it’s been years since I’ve seen one this intense. I took this photo through my polarized sunglasses, but the colors were bright even without them.
When my phone froze, he offered to send me one of his pictures just in case mine hadn’t actually saved. Fortunately they had, and I actually posted to Flickr several hours before his message made it through the cell network.
Within a few minutes, the cloud had drifted out of alignment, and the colors had faded completely.
An hour later, on the way back from lunch, I noticed a longer patch in a smoother cloud layer, but it was faint enough that I could only barely see it with my sunglasses on. Without them, it faded completely into the glare.
If I’d had my better camera with the zoom lens, I would have gotten some better shots of just the bright cloud. Then again, I wouldn’t have been carrying it with me to lunch, and the effect was gone in the time it would have taken to run back in and get it. So it’s probably just as well I stayed and watched instead.
Funny thing: I posted a cropped view on on Instagram featuring just the arc fragment and contrail. When I went back to look at the #rainbowcloud tag last night, I found no less than SIX other photos of what was clearly the same cloud at various points in its five-minute lifetime!
Enjoy Your Park!…Just Don’t Touch Anything
(Especially don’t touch the water. It’s nasty.)
The Ants Go Marching…to Strange Places
After four ant-free years, we’ve been invaded by ants that smell like nail polish when you squash them. Some of the stranger things that we’ve found ants going after over the past few weeks include:
- Children’s medicine. The ants don’t care about the antihistamines, just the sugary syrup. We washed everything out and now keep the liquid medicines in a ziplocked bag.
- A forgotten party favor with a bundle of jelly beans in it, in a box at the top of a bookshelf in our bedroom. From our wedding. 11 years ago. D’oh!
- A poster frame. More specifically, the dead bugs that had crawled into the open spaces in the tape who-knows-how-long-ago and gotten stuck. Eeew.
And of course the more typical targets like the kitchen trash can.
Now, while ants are new to this apartment, the place we lived before gave us a constant struggle. Some of the more spectacular cases were:
- The pantry and liquor cabinet. Ants were trying to crawl through the threads of every screw-top jar or bottle they could. We got in the habit of wiping the tops before closing them.
- The refrigerator and freezer. There was just enough room for them to crawl in, but they couldn’t handle the cold. The ants in the refrigerator got progressively slower farther from the entry point, and a pathetic swath of frozen ants coated part of the freezer door. We patched the gap using model magic.
- Underwear.
…yeah, I can’t really top that one.
Limited edition soda cans. OK, fine….HOW?
I guess collecting is sort of the point with a lot of media tie-in packaging (well, that and cross-promotion, of course), but I really have to wonder how people typically collect food packages. I mean, do you keep the can unopened and hope it doesn’t leak? Do you drink it even though the can won’t be in mint condition anymore?
Oh no. I just had a horrible thought about those Minions-labeled bananas!
Venus and Jupiter Conjunction: Three Views
On June 30, 2015, Venus and Jupiter lined up very closely in the night sky as seen from Earth, just 0.3 degrees apart — closer than the diameter of the full moon!
The day of the conjunction was muggy and cloudy, and I really didn’t expect to see them at all. To my surprise and relief, it cleared up and cooled off after nightfall.
You really don’t notice how much brighter Venus is than Jupiter until they’re right next to each other. Jupiter is much bigger, so it reflects a lot more sunlight, but it’s also a lot farther away.
Also, that conventional wisdom about how stars twinkle, but planets don’t? Not true. In turbulent air, planets absolutely twinkle.
Two nights later on July 2, I walked outside facing west. The sky near the horizon was still orange, but the two brightest planets were clearly visible against the deepening blue.
And just to show you how fast Venus moves across the sky, here’s the view 10 days before the conjunction, on June 20:
I didn’t have a tripod handy that night, so I used the top of the car, which conveniently lined up with Jupiter and the chimney.
Top of the Hill
Del Cerro Park, at the top of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, on a super windy evening. I saw two tumbleweeds roll by, and kept worrying I’d drop my phone while taking pictures.
I need to get out here (and other scenic spots) more often. Even though it’s not that far (one of the great things about the LA area is how close it is to sea, mountains, deserts, forests and so on), it’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day grind that you forget to step out and visit what’s right there, on the other side of the traffic and smog.
Photo album on Flickr: Del Cerro Views
Originally posted on Instagram