The sale of digital cameras is apparently slowing down because everyone now carries a cell phone that can take pictures almost as good as many cameras, at least much of the time. I have fallen prey to that same practice; the camera on my iPhone takes such good pictures in many situations that I rarely take a camera with me. Leah and I regretted that choice on Tuesday.

We had been downtown that evening and were driving back home just as the sun was setting. We were commenting all the way from town about how beautiful the clouds were, and how they looked like a painting. Then we turned onto Technology Parkway, which turns into Huffaker Road, and leads almost due west for several miles. That put the sunset directly ahead of us down the road. This sunset was one of the most beautiful, impressive and unusual ones that we had ever seen. Most of the clouds were dark against the sky. The sun was directly behind some clouds in the far distance. Those clouds were outlined by a brilliant, neon orange rim, and pink and gray crepuscular rays shot out around them. So I pulled out my phone and tried to take a picture. Unfortunately, since this situation was not one of those that a phone camera does well, you will have to take my word for it. Here’s the photo.

Cell phone cameras have wide angle lenses, which I usually like for landscapes, but in this case I desperately needed a zoom lens. The part of the image I wanted is very small in the original shot, and cropping down that much requires a lot more resolution than the cell phone camera can provide. I cropped it down here so you can get a vague idea of what we saw.

It is an understatement to say that these images don’t do justice to the scene as we saw it. I’ve learned a lesson from this: from now on, I’m taking a camera.

However, the cell phone did a great job for this image.

These clouds show a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the atmosphere. They are basically just like breaking waves in the ocean. There are plenty of much better examples online, but this is one of the best I have seen recently.

One of the things I like about seeing phenomena like this is that they tell you what’s going on in the atmosphere. From a distance I can tell that the atmosphere is stratified and that there are layers of air moving at different velocities. The wave clouds are right that the interface of those two layers. That kind of information doesn’t give me any practical benefit, but I like having it anyway.