Having lost all sense of time, in regards to what day it is or what time of day it is, I’m still “mining” the ton of pictures that I took on the eclipse trip to Texas earlier this month.
This panorama was taken from a rest stop in New Mexico, just to the east of Las Cruces, where I was about to head into that thunderstorm, which indeed did have high winds, lightning, thunder, heavy rain, and light hail. It was spectacular!
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Weather
Two days back home and this weekend I’m going to try to go through the eclipse photos and see what’s good. There’s got to be at least one or two, right? Statistical fluctuations and all of that!
In the meantime, because I like pictures of clouds and storms and potentially violent weather, enjoy these pictures from Tuesday on the trip from Kerrville to Tucson.
Here are some mammatus clouds. They’re supposed to be a sign of particularly violent weather, the boiling bottom of a big thunderhead cell. (These were, no “supposed to be” about it.)
This panoramic view of a freaking huge thunderstorm supercell should have been like Gandalf standing there, blocking the road, bellowing, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” I passed anyway.
As for the eclipse photos that I need to sort through and clean up, I suspect that the videos might be better than the still photos. Mistakes were made.
On the other hand, remember the T-shirt that I was wearing? (Picture here.) I may crop that a little, find a place that does custom T-shirts, and have this image of me printed on there with a caption that says, “Hello DORKness, My Old Friend!” I mean, if the shoe fits!
Filed under Panorama, Paul, Photography, Travel, Weather
Back to the “real world,” which lives somewhere on the far side of about 20 hours of driving, which means about 28 hours of traveling. Out in three days to make sure I arrived relatively rested and had a lot of slack in the schedule should anything go sideways. Back in two days – because it can be done, I need to get it done, and there’s plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead! 😵
There was weather! Small hail, BIIIIIIG thunder & lightning, moderate deluges here and there.
So tonight is my last on this toad trip. I should be back home about dinner time tomorrow. That’s a good thing.
While it was important for me to prove to myself that I can still pull off this kind of trip, I would be big time lying if I said it was as easy as it was 20 years ago.
Tonight I have managed to find the most bizarre, trendy, artsy fartsy, fru-fru, potentially horrible little Marriott spinoff hotel in the world! I have eaten “yucca fries,” whatever they are.
It’s another adventure! An unexpected side quest!
It will be excellent!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Look at this gorgeous sunset from San Antonio tonight!
It’s not quite “clear and a million,” but it would do for tomorrow.
Totality in Kerrville starts at 13:32 CDT. There’s mow a 77% chance of “clouds” then, but that could mean something like this (which would be FINE) to heavy, thick, low rain clouds (which would NOT be).
It will be what it will be. But if any of the gods are listening and could deign to cut us some slack, we’ll take it.
“Some days it’s better to be lucky than good!” I’ve been good – now I’ll graciously accept some good luck.
Clear skies, eclipse buckaroos!!
As the prophecy foretold…
A) Here come the clouds.
The more detailed and precise cloud cover forecasts start on Saturday, but the short version as of now is we may be SOL all the way from the Mexican border to Ohio. We shall see.
B) This may be the night the site publishing streak ends. It’s almost 01:30 here in Texas, but still only 23:30 at my home in California. Which clock is the WordPress computer looking at when it decides to hand out Brownie points? I can hope, but I’m pretty sure I know.
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Today was a second long day of driving. And two time zone changes, so suddenly I’ve lost two hours.
There are many, many pictures of really neat things that will require longer posts later. Then there was the legendary experience of trying to get dinner at 21:30 on a Thursday night in Fort Stockton, Texas…
Tomorrow I’ll be in Kerrville, I’ll meet up with my son, and we’ll start plotting the weekend and doomscrolling about cloud cover and weather forecasts.
It’s an amazing adventure!!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Doomscrolling through the weather sites…
Too many of the predictions are pointing toward something that looks a lot like our front yard in SoCal this evening. For example,
(Plot by Tomer Burg, arctic.som.ou.edu)
This is the “GEFS Downward Shortwave Radiation” prediction. I won’t pretend to really understand what all of that means, except grey means bad and blue means good, and where I’m headed is the second darkest shade of grey. And there are dozens and dozens of different models, different agencies, different colors, different data sets – they’re all pointing the same way.
This prediction was generated ten days out from the event, so it’s going to change, possibly by a significant amount, but likely not by a ton. The details will get more refined for all of those exact locations, but in broad strokes, it’s looking a lot like there are going to be significant clouds along 90% of the eclipse path, all the way from Mexico to the Great Lakes.
We knew this was a possibility. I am very surprised to see so much of the eclipse path covered in clouds. Normally I would expect a couple of storms possible, which means maybe driving toward the Mexican border or up toward Arkansas. But needing to drive all the way to eastern Ohio???!!!
It will be what it will be. You’ll hear me saying that a lot in the next ten days. Barring some disaster I’ll be in Texas next Friday, spend the weekend there watching the forecast and going over options, then taking our best shot on Monday. I have no control over the weather.
Say goodbye to March, friends! It could have been worse, but it sure could have been better as well. Let’s hope that April finally cuts us some slack, especially with the cloud cover on the afternoon of April 8th!
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather
The forefront of yet another weekend storm. Yet again we’re expected to get 3″ or more of rain (which is a LOT for SoCal if you’re not up in the mountains) and we’re under flash flood and high wind warnings through the weekend.
I haven’t really been keeping track, but now that I’ve noticed it, haven’t we had rain on the weekends like four or five weekends in a row, or five of the last six, or something like that? I like the rain and we need it to get rid of a several-year-long drought, but what happened to “sunny SoCal”?
That’s it! I’m leaving! I’M GOING TO GO TO TEXAS! (Well, later this week at least. I need to check into my hotel for the eclipse on Friday.)
Filed under Photography, Weather
When I went out to get the Sunday morning groceries and pick up breakfast it was clear as a bell. I didn’t even take a picture (imagine that!) because it was just…blue. Lots and lots of blue.
15:54 – I was squirreled away in my office for several hours after that until all of a sudden the cable signal on all channel got interrupted with one of those emergency weather alerts for a dangerous thunderstorm with potential hail, wind, lightning, and local flooding. It was off in the San Gabriel Valley, sixty miles to our east, but a quick check of the radar showed that the one sparking the alert was just the worst of four or five thunderstorm cells drifting about, and one of them was close to us.
16:59 – One of the cells was very close to Dodger Stadium and Downtown LA, with the Angels playing the Dodgers in the first of the Freeway Series spring training games. Here I could hear occasional thunder and there were a couple of quick, moderate showers, but no real rain – yet.
17:37 – Now it’s raining, and raining pretty good. More thunder, but out in the front yard, looking west, there’s the sun shining through the broken edge of the the thunderstorm cell. It’s quite the spectacle with the heavy rain being backlit by the bright Sun. I ran out to the back yard to see if we might get a spectacular rainbow, but we struck out on that. A couple of miles away there were reports of medium-sized hail and heavier showers, but we just got grazed by the edge of the cell.
19:11 – We get more alerts about “our” thunderstorm cell being a danger to mariners out over Santa Monica Bay to our south where it’s drifted, but off to the north we’ve just got a lot of broken clouds and a highly unstable atmosphere. This however is great for getting a spectacular sunset. With more rain directly west of us, the normal view we have of the pink and golden clouds behind the grove of silhouetted palm trees is grey and gloomy and dark, but looking to the side from the back yard it’s bright and colorful.
19:14 – Behind us to the east, peeking in and out of all of the broken clouds and scattered thunderstorm cells, the 99.9% full moon is rising. Fourteen days to the eclipse. Ready or not…
Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather
It was raining this morning (as predicted) when I got up, but cleared up in the early afternoon. There was actually some sun showing, and I could hear the now resident red-shouldered hawk screaming out in the trees. I went out and was looking off to the north and east for the hawk. Something caught my eye and I turned back to the south.
WOW! This layout across the sky, this composition, this mixture of forms and shadows and various shades of white and sunlight… WOW!
I understand that there’s a huge mix here of cirrus clouds and stratus clouds and some building cumulonimbus clouds and so on. But all together? “WOW clouds.”
I grew up in Kansas for a while, saw lots of HUGE thunderstorms, even a tornado or two, and I do dearly love seeing and experiencing that kind of violent weather. But there’s a lot of simple joy in suddenly turning around and seeing a 360º panorama like this.
Simple pleasures, folks. Don’t ignore them.
Filed under Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 