Katie’s hall costume for the day: Yomiko Readman, Paper Master — from the anime series Read or Die.
Friday was a good day for costumes at Comic Con.
Category: Photos
Weather Box
I’d always assumed these boxes were just the usual electrical, cable, phone or other utility access points. But I walked past this one a few weeks ago and saw it open. It turned out to be a station for gathering weather data.
Surrounded!
Pack of Sundogs
Last Wednesday, on my drive home from work, I spotted a sundog on the way home from work. I finally snapped it when I pulled into the parking lot at Trader Joe’s.
The picture on the left was the best of the set, with the best contrast. The red is clearly visible on the end toward the sun, and the reflection is clearly brighter than the surrounding clouds. The one on the right is actually two minutes earlier, and isn’t as good — except that it looks like there are two sundogs (something I hadn’t noticed when I took the picture). Presumably there was a gap in the cloud of ice crystals, and one half or the other drifted out of alignment.
Photo: Old Balcony
This is a picture I took last summer of the balcony on our old apartment. I used it to test using Flickr’s email upload and blog-posting features to upload a picture straight from my phone.
Unfortunately, it needed cleanup. The title (and post slug) end up being the filename, which I suppose I can fix before sending, and the content seems to get posted twice. I suspect the phone is sending both formatted and plain-text versions of the message, and Flickr is reading them both.
Anyway, it’s not a bad picture, so I figured I’d leave it up instead of deleting the test post.
Rainbow Feather Cloud
On my way back to work after lunch today, I looked out the window and saw this feathery wisp of cloud with a clear rainbow pattern running from red at the the top to violet in the middle, then turning plain white below.
As I drove south, the colors moved down the cloud, disappearing entirely by the time I got back. By the time I could safely snap a photo, it was already more or less midway down the cloud.
I believe it’s a fragment of a circumhorizon arc, judging by the description:
Look for a circumhorizon arc near to noon near to the summer solstice when the sun is very high in the sky (higher than 58°). It lies well below the sun — twice as far from it (two hand spans) as the 22º halo.
The arc is a very large halo and is close to, and parallel to the horizon. Usually only fragments are visible where there happen to be cirrus clouds.
We’re still 2 months from the summer solstice, but it was 12:38 PM DST (half an hour before true noon), and the sun was apparently near 70.6° high. (The site is aimed at UK visitors, after all.) It also looked too far away from the sun to be part of the 22º halo, plus of course the colors were more well-defined.
This also points out the should-be-obvious fact that ice crystals can still form in the upper atmosphere even when it’s warm — say, 90°F — on the ground, so there’s no need to limit halo-hunting to winter.
I recommend checking out Atmospheric Optics’ additional pictures of circumhorizon arcs, most of which are more complete than this one. Some of them quite spectacular and must have been really impressive to see live.
Update: I spotted and photographed a much larger and more solid arc in May 2010.
Under Construction Indefinitely
We went to Wayzgoose* at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.
Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.
Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.
What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.
The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.
Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.
I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.
*Update 2019: Since the link seems to be dead, some context: Wayzgoose was part of Celebrate UCI, a combination festival, open house (for prospective sutdents and parents), and club fair. It started with a medieval theme in the 1970s, though by the 1990s that was already fading. Once that was gone, there was a slow shift of emphasis away from Wayzgoose and toward Celebrate UCI as far as branding went, presumably because nobody knows what a Wayzgoose is, but everyone knows what a celebration is.