This squirrel bounded along a wall carrying a walnut in its mouth as I walked down the sidewalk. It stopped and looked at me as if it had been caught in the act of walnut burglary. I had enough time to snap a couple of pictures with my phone and pull out my camera for a better shot before it scampered away.
This solar halo fragment is high in the sky, near where you’d expect something rare like a circumzenithal arc. But it’s wrapped around the sun at just the right distance to be a common 22° circular halo. On July afternoons, the sun is high to begin with!
Gotta love it when the camera’s autofocus insists gives you this wonderfully clear image of…the grass in front of the skittish animal you’re trying to get a picture of before it scampers away.
I did manage to get one shot of it before moving on, and then I was able to spot a clearer view of another rabbit during the same hike.
The last few hikes I’ve done at Madrona Marsh, I’ve taken a lot fewer photos. This time…I went a little overboard taking pictures of just about every type of plant or animal I could to post to iNaturalist. Then I narrowed it down to around 40 “good” photos that I’m posting on Flickr over the next week or so. Sadly, my camera battery ran out about halfway through, leaving me with only my phone. Which was perfectly fine for close-ups and landscapes, but not for zoom shots.
Two views of a 22-degree circular halo around the sun that I saw on a walk this afternoon.
Halos are a lot more common than I used to think. Then I started actually looking for them. Even on a warm day like today, there can still be ice crystals higher in the atmosphere of the right size and shape to cause a display like this (or even more complicated ones).
Usually I just go for a utilitarian, “got a picture of the halo,” but this time I tried about five different things to block the sun, trying to compose an interesting shot as well. I’m going to have to keep that up!
Flickr has spent the last day offline, moving the rest of their services out of Yahoo’s datacenters. But to keep people involved, they’re holding a Good Panda Photo Contest where you print out the panda from the “Down For Maintenance” page and take a photo of it off having some adventure.
I went a little overboard with getting the panda into whimsical situations! 🙂
I plan on posting the one with the coffee mug as my entry once uploads are working again, but I may post a full album of the panda’s adventures!
Update: Flickr seems to be stable again! And entries aren’t limited to just one photo. Here’s the Flickr version of this gallery, and here’s the official contest group where everyone is sharing their Panda adventures.
Update: The kid got in on the action as well!
