More unexpected, widely scattered, pop-up thunderstorms. Nothing heavy near us, but I was out on the front yard and this was looking threatening.
Literally two seconds later, the first of many drops started slamming into the back of my head.
I suspect if you zoom in far enough on this picture you can see a million or so not-so-tiny drops, falling at terminal velocity, targeting my skull like Nature’s own soggy cruise missiles!
I ran for the house. Fortunately, I was designed to be drip-dry.
Filed under Photography, Weather
In the middle of watching the hockey game tonight (it was good, Kings 5-0 over the Blackhawks) we got a blaring warning emergency alert, followed by the robot voice synthesizer from the National Weather Service warning about severe weather, up to and including hail, thunderstorms, and a possible tornado. WTAF?!
We didn’t get more than a few drops here, most of the action was east of Downtown LA and in the San Gabriel Valley, all thirty to fifty miles to our east. (Southern California’s a big place.)
By late tonight, the leftover remnants were over us, and with the quarter moon (that bright spot in the lower right) lighting them up from above and the light pollution from the city lighting them up from below, they looked pretty cool!
The big takeaway lesson for the evening, however, was that it’s so much harder to get down on the ground and then back up to my feet than I remember it being when I was younger. This sucks! (For the record, I was laying down on my back on the patio to try to stabalize my arms when holding my phone to take these 10 second exposures, rather than just walking inside the house to get one of the dozen or so tripods I have… Okay, so, the true takeaway is that I’m an idiot, but that’s not exactly news now, is it?)
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Uncategorized, Weather
Yet another one of those days when the forecast did not include rain. And yet…
Those are not puffy, happy, “fair weather” clouds. If those are in the Midwest, there are tornado warning sirens going off.
And it stretched across a good stretch of the sky. 30 seconds later it was raining pretty hard.
Not nearly as hard as it was raining to the east of us where that BIG storm was.
And when it was over…
It wasn’t a full rainbow. Over to the right it was black as night as that thunderstorm had moved a bit south. But to the north, for a minute…
Yeah. It’s that whole “hope” thing.
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Weather
What a pleasant surprise today! I was taking a quick break and grabbing a soda in the kitchen when I saw something large-ish going through the pine trees on the slope beyond the back yard. It wasn’t any mourning dove, much larger, some sort of raptor. I grabbed a camera and headed out into the rain.
I figured that it had just been passing through and I might see it circling over the canyon someplace. It was rainy and starting to close in so I didn’t see anything in the sky. Suddenly my pattern recognition kicked in and I realized that this guy was sitting right there, staring at me.
After I got a couple of pictures from the back yard, I decided to see if the hawk would sit still while I went down the stairs to the “lower level.” To my surprise and delight, it did! Although it was giving me some serious stink eye.
I was still maybe 20-25 feet away and about even with it, although if I had tried to go over to the tree it was in I would have been 30 feet below it. That hill is steep. I guess it decided that I was mostly harmless. (I am! Mostly…)
By this point the rain was coming down steadily and while the hawk was looking all over, it didn’t seem too happy about the meteorological conditions.
What kind of hawk is it? It’s a mystery, sort of. I ran four different pictures through the Merlin Bird ID app (from Cornell Lap, get it!) and all four said it might be a Cooper’s Hawk or a Red-shouldered Hawk. In either case it’s probably a juvenile, but that’s more likely if it’s a Red-shouldered Hawk. That’s my bet, simply because the Cooper’s Hawks that I’ve seen up close have solid brown or tan chests, where these patterns are more like the Red-shouldered Hawks. I could have positively ID it if it had sounded off, their calls are much different. But not a peep was heard.
I expected it to fly off any second, but it just sat there. After about fifteen minutes I was more wet than I really liked, and I had the option of going inside. I came back out an hour later and it was still sitting there, which I found really surprising. But it was gone a half-hour after that.
I shot a couple minutes of video while waiting and hoping it would either sound off, fly away, or both. No joy on all counts, but it’s a gorgeous creature!
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography, Video, Weather
This one is actually from a week or so ago – today was clear and “boring” as colors and clouds go.
This one didn’t start with a lot of color, but the clouds and definition in the structures was exceptional.
As always, the silhouetted palm trees were splendid.
We finally got to see a little bit of color.
And more shadows of cloud on cloud. So freakin’ gorgeous. Tell me, how often do you look for something like this in your busy life? If it’s happening, how often do you spend ten minutes just watching? If the answer to either question is “never,” you might need to re-evaluate your life choices.
We’re looking hard a houses up in the high desert someplace. The sunsets and sunrises there can be even more spectacular (see these, for example), but I hope I can find a place with a couple of palm trees to add some character to that horizon while the sky’s doing tricks.
Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather
I was fortunate this evening to get a quick heads up from a good friend that the sunset going on outside at the moment was “epic.”
She wasn’t wrong! It had been vascillating between damp, showers, rain, and downpours all day, but being back in “damp” mode (it’s raining again now) meant that some sunlight was getting through.
Then, about two minutes later, these spectral vapors just materialized out of thin air.
The air was saturated with moisture, cool, and apparently right on the edge of condensation into clouds.
Some small eddy or disturbance, probably with a breeze coming up the canyon and getting some lift, cooling and spinning just a bit, caused these to puff into visibility.
A stray late sunset, pink and orange ray of sunlight found a hole and poked through like a spotlight, catching them against the dark background of the thicker, unlit clouds off in the distance.
Knowing what causes it doesn’t make it any less spectacular. (But all of those stupid wires!)
So I ran down the hill to the spot where I watch SpaceX launches out of Vandenberg, free from wires. Those couple of minutes cost me in terms of less color and sunlight, but the two wraiths were still lit.
Barely! Between the sunlight fading and the disturbance that had caused them dying out, they were vanishing, the visible moisture evaporating and being absorbed back into the air as equilibrium with the surrounding local atmosphere was reestablished.
And then it was gone. Almost – I caught just the slightest trace of color to the left of that palm tree crown. (And then I had to climb back up that hill to get home!)
EPIC! Indeed.
Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather
I’m no meteorologist, but I look at clouds a lot and pay attention and I like to think I’ve got an above average grasp of the way things work, so when I see something new and different and odd I tend to pay attention. And take pictures.
I didn’t say I always take good pictures. But in this case I wasn’t sure how long the phenomenon would be stable and visible, so ignore the wires and the puffy clouds in the foreground, and look at the nine or ten horizontal, parallel (-ish) lines of clouds beyond, somewhere out over Ventura County.
Except for at airshows where there are multiple planes in formation burning smoke oil, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this.
I actually considered at first that it might be from aircraft flying in formation, but the smoke trails there are never this thick.
After a couple of minutes it looked like a burst of high altitude winds started to sweep across part of the lines on the right side, disbursing and scattering the lines.
It’s still linear on the left (and further to the right, but it was tough to see through the foreground clouds) but in this middle section everything was getting mixed and smeared out across the sky.
Going to research this online is an adventure. First of all, searching for “clouds that look like plantation shutters” will get a psychotic and psychedelic AI essay that made *NO* damn sense at all. Totally wacko, and not in a good way.
Secondly, searching for “clouds in horizontal, parallel lines” is a little bit more productive. These are apparently “altostratus undulatus” clouds. They don’t seem particularly uncommon. Something about them this day made them stand out and grab my attention.
And I had a camera nearby!
Filed under Photography, Weather
I didn’t think we were supposed to get more rain before next weekend – the forecast was for something like a 10% chance.
No one bothered to tell the rain that came through however.
Stupid, illiterate, uninformed rain! It was just as wet, however.
Time to reset the timers to keep the sprinklers off for another few days.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Ambivalent clouds.
Are you going to rain or not? The dark bottom part is raggedy and threatening, but the top isn’t so sure at all.
The top part wants to rise, go up to 10,000 or 20,000 feet, get icy and thin.
These guys over here already developed an altitude and they’re just blocking a touch of sun. (Eventually the lower, thicker clouds blew off toward Las Vegas and rained there.)
Filed under Photography, Weather
The almost full moon is very, very bright through a thin layer of broken clouds.
It’s a well known phenomenon to get a 22º circle around the moon when it’s seen through a high layer of ice crystals, but I’m pretty sure the circular rainbows seen in these pictures are something different, even if they might be distantly related.
If that color is more or less true, these are more like rainbows. But I wonder if the effect is real, or an artifact of how the iPhone sensor is trying to record what it sees, and how the iPhone software tries to fiddle with what data gets recorded so that it looks “real.”
Granted, when you look at the moon like this, there appears to be a pale, colored ring. So does the iPhone enhance that to make visible what the human eye can only hint at? Does it give us an insight into the universe around us that our mere human senses can just barely register?
Or are the sensor and software trying to add 2 + 2 and getting 37 because they’re pre-programmed to expect an answer in the high thirties (-ish)?
Reality is not what it used to be – and this is when I’m 100% cold sober!
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 