Category Archives: Halos and arcs

Some photos

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I haven’t posted for a while, so I have a backlog of photos. Here are a few of them.

There was a nice shower over town a week ago (or so) that produced an almost complete rainbow.

Later, some clouds got in the action.

Some of the flowers in the flower bed beside our house were in bloom. The irises are impressive, but they don’t last too long. This is looking towards the thick tangle of trees across the driveway. The crape myrtles are just starting to bloom.

Looking back towards the house.

Here are some closer shots.

More recently we have had an invasion of Japanese beetles. This is the first year they have been a problem, at least above ground. I looked at our crape myrtles a few days ago and saw a few of them. I couldn’t reach the tops of the plants where the beetles like to do their business, so I sprayed some pesticide. It scared away a lot of beetles, but probably didn’t do any good. Yesterday I noticed them on the yellow flowers you can see in the foreground of the third photo above. I think the flowers are irises.

My preferred method of control is to get a container of hot, soapy water and drown them. They have a defense mechanism that makes that approach work reasonably well. When the beetles are disturbed, most of the time they simply drop from their perch. I place the container immediately beneath them, so they drop into the water. The detergent reduces the surface tension, so they sink and drown. Here is my first harvest.

I didn’t count them, but I estimate more than 50 and probably less than 100.

On Sunday I found more. I got around 30 this time. I hope their numbers continue to decline. They are seriously destructive. The crape myrtle blooms that were visible in the first shot of the flowers are no longer visible; they have been eaten, along with a lot of the upper foliage. They have also eaten away a lot of the irises, and some of their foliage.

I surprised a lot of them in the throes of passion. That was particularly satisfying because of what the offspring do.

I was not aware that their larvae damage grass roots and can cause visible damage to the grass above ground. I have noticed a few places where my grass is not doing well. I don’t know whether Japanese beetles are responsible, but I spent enough time, money and effort on our front yard that I don’t intend to let the little bastards damage the grass. Traps for the adult beetles apparently cause more harm than good because they attract far more beetles than they trap. Biological warfare against the larvae seems to be an effective course of action, although it can take years to work well. I will probably get some of the bacteria that are used (a bacterium called Paenibacillus popilliae.) Then I will poison them.

Parade of rainbows

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The remnants of the first named storm of the hurricane season, Alberto, passed to our west on Tuesday, bringing periodic showers. We had already had a lot of rain a few days ago that was not associated with the storm, but with the tropical air mass we have had for some time.

Tuesday evening, there were small, isolated showers passing all around us. We looked out the front door and saw rain falling over town, plus a rainbow. The rainbow dissipated as the shower moved to the north, but it was followed by another shower, and another rainbow. This is a series of images I took as the showers and rainbows paraded by over town.


The rain was falling in bands, so the rainbows themselves were banded.

Although the weather forecasters expected a lot of rain from the storm, we got very little. Fortunately, with the earlier, heavy rain from a few days ago, we have pretty much caught up on precipitation for a while. I have been trying to prepare the furthest reaches of our front yard for planting grass. Now the ground will be far too muddy to work for several days. That’s OK, because I need to do some more work in the house anyway.

Thursday Sky

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We had a nice shower Thursday evening, the first rain we’ve had in, well, I can’t remember. A long time. The temperature dropped 20 degrees to 64F in just a few minutes. We had a high of 89F on Thursday, according to our thermometer. It’s supposed to reach into the mid-90s by the weekend.

We ended up with a half an inch of rain, and a rainbow.

The fainter, secondary bow was visible. I zoomed to try to get a better shot.

 

Contrails and a sundog

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Saturday morning just after 10 the eastern sky seemed to be full of contrails. There was also a faint parhelion, or sundog.

Shooting into the sun is not a great way to get much detail, but this worked fairly well. The sundog is a little to the left of the sun (about 22°, exactly where it should be). The small, bright blue dot further to the left and down a little is apparently an artifact of the lens of my iPhone.

I haven’t seen quite this many contrails at one time around here. We are close to some flight paths to the Atlanta airport, so airliners often fly overhead. Delta flies almost directly over our house on the Huntsville-Atlanta route; I once actually saw our old house from a Huntsville-Atlanta leg on my way out to California. Contrails usually dissipate before many more planes fly over, but not Saturday morning.

This sundog was a little higher in the sky than one usually sees. They are fairly common if you know when and where to look, usually seen in early morning or late afternoon, fairly close to the horizon. They are usually formed by plate-shaped ice crystals, which tend to orient themselves horizontally as they fall through the atmosphere. The sun’s rays have to pass through them edgewise to form the partial 22° halo, of which the sundog is a part. In order to see them at higher sun elevations, the crystals have to be column-shaped so that they have random orientations as they fall. If the ice crystals are randomly oriented at least some fraction will be at the right orientation to let sunlight pass through them so that a sundog will be visible. And so it was last Saturday.

I love looking out our windows.

Some sky shots

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I bought a tub enclosure for the new house Thursday afternoon (Nov 12). This is what I saw as I was leaving.

sundog2

There is a nice sundog on the right. There were no clouds to the left of the sun, so no sundog there. There is a hint of color above the sun which may be a camera artifact, although it seems to appear in cloud areas and (perhaps) not in clear sky. If the clouds had had the right mix of ice crystals, the sundog could have extended up into the clouds above it. The clouds obviously contained mostly hexagonal flat plates, which tend to orient themselves horizontally so that the sunlight passes through them along the hexagonal edges, dispersing the colored light only in limited directions. The “right” crystals would have included a significant percentage of hexagonal columns, which have no preferred orientation and can thus disperse the light into more directions. Anyway, it was nice.

On Sunday morning Leah told me to go onto the deck and see the sunrise.

sunrise16nov2015

I shot this with our little Nikon point-and-shoot. I wonder if the iPhone would have done a better job with exposure, since it seems to have a wider dynamic range. The bright areas might not have washed out.