Treetops

Whew, the last few nights have been pretty rough trying to catch up on all the work I didn’t do this past weekend. Here’s another pair of pictures from the trip to Odell Lake:

It’s not often I catch the moon close enough to the horizon during the day to get a shot of it with anything but sky in the picture. My moon photos usually don’t come out this clear either, so I’m happy on both counts.

This one was taken on one of the cross county ski trails around the lodge. I really like the way the clouds turned out in the top left corner. They contrast very nicely against the dark blue sky from the polarizing filter. I would have liked to have gotten the entire sky that dark, but it didn’t work out with the sun at the time. I also like how the dead tree left of center kinda matches up with the leading edge of the clouds in both shape and color.

-Ben

A Lunar Treat

I got a call last night, around 11, while I was working on my take-home test for Real Analysis.  It was my friend Caleb calling to tell me to come outside and look at the moon, and to bring my camera.  I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, but I figured I could use a break, so I grabbed my camera bag and headed out the door.  I found him outside, staring up at the sky.  Following his gaze, I was able to make out a ring around the moon.  We headed out to the middle of the drillfield, where it was marginally darker, to get a better look, and here’s what we saw:

This was taken with a 15 second exposure, shorter ones didn’t really capture much of the ring.  I’d have to say that this ranks up there as one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in the night sky.  The name of this phenomenon is the 22° halo.  You can read more about it here if you’re interested.  Basically, the ring is formed when the light reflecting off of the moon is refracted through hexagonal ice crystals present in high, thin, cirrus clouds.  I think one of the coolest aspects of this is that the disk between the moon and the halo is so much darker than the surrounding sky, another phenomenon known as an Alexander’s Band.  The first thing that pops into my head is that it looks like a giant clear sphere with a single light source floating in the middle of it.  Because of the way the ice crystals refract the light, you may be able to make out different colors in the ring.  Once we noticed that, I zoomed in on the bottom edge of the ring to see if they would show up more clearly without as much light from the moon:

It’s pretty easy to pick out all of the colors of the rainbow here, with the red on the inside of the ring and the violet on the outer edge.

-Ben

A Golden Haze

Well…my wrists have gotten better enough so that I can at least hold my camera again, not quite in the correct grip, but it gets the job done.  I went out after dinner tonight for a walk around campus and to take some pictures.  I’ve seen in a lot of places where photographers refer to the hour or so before sunset or after sunrise as the “golden hour.”  There are two reasons for this, the first is that the lighting at the end of the day is often ideal for shooting, creating great contrast and shadows in pictures.  The second, which is fairly evident in the picture above is that the setting (or rising) sun casts a golden color over the landscape, which also makes for some really cool photos.

This shot is taken from the edge of the cornfields out past the duck pond looking towards the horse barn.  Between where I’m standing and the landscape in the distance is a gravel road.  My theory is that there had been a good number of vehicles on the road kicking up dust into the air.  It’s this dust that is catching the sunlight so nicely and looking like a golden mist floating above the ground.

After uploading the pictures from tonight to my computer, I cropped this one just a little to remove a nasty sun flare in the top left corner.  I think the trees on either side of the photo and the bushes at the bottom frame the distant landscape really nicely here.  The sky is really washed out, but I was shooting almost directly into the sun, so it was hard to avoid I’m afraid.

As I was making my way back to the dorm, I happened to notice off to the right that a full moon was just starting to rise.  As I rounded the last corner past the duck pond, I saw a really neat shot with the moon, still pretty big since it was low on the horizon.  It looked like it was being cradled in a slight dip in the treeline.  This is zoomed in the full 20x:

-Ben