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Wispy clouds with an upside-down rainbow near the top of the sky.

The last few weeks have been really good for halos. The first tangent arc I’ve seen, a clear circumscribed halo, the more common sundogs and 22° halos, and now a circumzenith arc, looking like an upside-down rainbow high above the sun, wrapping around the top of the sky.

I think this is the second I’ve seen, but the first was only a fragment.

Like all sun halos, they’re formed by light reflecting through ice crystals. And since those crystals can be in the upper atmosphere, you can see them even in warmer places like Los Angeles.

Taken with my phone through polarized sunglasses. Color and contrast enhanced.

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Full moon, mostly red except for a whiter edge at the upper left.

The evening was hectic, and I almost forgot. I had literally just put my son to bed when I remembered, “The eclipse!” We went out to see if the sky was clear.

Clouds were rushing across the sky, but for the most part, it was clear, and we had a perfect view of the moon looking like a dark brown chunk of rock in the sky.

Update: It wasn’t quite this red to the eye, it was more of a deep brown, maybe slightly brick red. Probably a matter of retina sensitivity vs. camera sensors.

(Then I spent 10 minutes fighting with camera settings while he went back to bed.)

Update: I went back out about an hour later to check out the view as the moon left the earth’s shadow, and caught these two photos, taken about the same time with different exposures so that you can see either the lit portion of the moon, or the part that’s still in the earth’s shadow.

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When I first started paying attention to solar ice halos, I read about tangent arcs. But this is the first time I'm sure I've *seen* one.

A diffuse bright V-shaped light in the sky, slightly redder on the lower edge, with a faint arc of light extending downward from the center.

When I first started paying attention to solar ice halos, I read about tangent arcs. But this is the first time I’m sure I’ve seen one. The tangent arcs appear above and below the sun, branching out from the 22° circular halo (which you can see here, very faintly), and change shape depending on how high the sun is in the sky.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was behind the next building over. I ended up snapping a shot with my phone, wishing I could have grabbed a better camera, but the Pixel 2 caught a surprising amount of detail once I adjusted the brightness to bring it out. (No, the sky wasn’t this dark!). It’s a far cry from the G1’s photo of a very blue (and blurry) set of halos 10 years ago, or even the Galaxy S4’s colorless rainbows at sunset four years ago.

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Because seismic waves are slower than internet signals, it’s possible to send an alert after an earthquake starts, but before the shaking reaches you. A few seconds’ warning is enough to pull over to the side of the road, climb down from a ladder, step away from a high shelf or window, put down a scalpel, etc.

Mexico and Japan both have systems like this, and Los Angeles has launched a pilot program with apps for both Android and iOS.

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Last month, Tumblr and Flickr both announced policy changes that will impact a lot of users, and upset even more. Flickr announced that they’d be shrinking the storage offered to free accounts while adding features to paid accounts. Tumblr announced that all adult content was going to be banned, and immediately set about flagging posts and accounts. In the clumsiest way possible. With a lot of errors.

I feel like Tumblr has been knocked out of orbit, and it’s only a matter of time before it goes the way of GeoCities (or at least LiveJournal). But I actually feel more confident about Flickr. Why?

  • Flickr was bought by SmugMug, a company that’s all about photos. Tumblr was part of the Yahoo! package bought by Verizon, a giant telecom conglomerate that’s searching for a way to monetize users’s content.
  • Flickr has had a freemium business model as long as I can remember.
  • The new free tier at Flickr may be limited, but it’s still big (1000 photos), and it’s still more than they offered before the move to “Let’s get people to host ALL their pictures here!” a few years back (200 photos, IIRC).
  • And that limit is both clear and non-judgmental, not a fuzzy, badly-implemented line that on other social media sites has frequently turned out to be the first step down a slippery slope (like the “Strikethrough” episode at LiveJournal that ultimately led to a lot of fanfic writers and fan artists leaving LJ in favor of, well, Tumblr.)
  • Flickr’s customers are the paying Flickr Pro users. Tumblr’s customers are the advertisers.

In short: Flickr is focusing on their core. Tumblr just jettisoned a huge segment of their users and gave the rest a big red warning flag.

I’ve been a paying Flickr customer for years now, and I’m happy to renew. I still post galleries there, and and my better one-off photos.

Tumblr…I don’t have anything that violates the new rules, but it seems like they’ve taken a step towards self-destruction. Between this, Google+ closing, and the ongoing train wrecks of Twitter & Facebook, I’ve decided to pull back. I’ve downloaded an archive of my entire blog, and I’m in the process of clearing out all my share-posts, reblogs, mirrored posts, basically anything that’s not either original to that blog or an actual conversation. And I’m starting to import the original content here, where it’s under my own control.

It’s clear that Verizon has even less idea what to do with Tumblr than Yahoo! did. When they finally give up trying to monetize what’s left of the user base, they’ll have no incentive to keep it going. Or to respect all the user data they’ve amassed.

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I often see conservatives say that they see individuals where liberals see groups. But it doesn’t track. Conservatives are regularly willing to exclude whole groups of people, then allow exceptions. On the same issues, liberals often allow groups, then exclude individuals.

Put another way, liberals want to ensure everyone eligible is allowed access, and conservatives want to ensure everyone ineligible is denied access.

Voting rights, immigration, social programs… Even if they agreed on who should be eligible, the priorities are different.

Of course, we don’t agree on who is eligible, for a lot of issues. And some of those issues are who’s eligible to be treated humanely.

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I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

Orange moon in a night sky above a darkened horizon with city lights.

I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

I was coming home shortly after sunset, got to the top of a hill and saw this deep orange moon, flattened near the horizon. By the time I found a place to stop, it had risen high enough that it was mostly round.

Composite of a background shot (the moon was waay too bright!) and a zoom photo of the moon. I apparently moved a little bit, so the wire passing in front of it doesn’t line up exactly.