Category: Photos

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Snow covered mountains lit up by the sun, with clouds above them.

Yesterday morning on my way to work, I looked over and saw the San Gabriel Mountains practically glowing with the morning light of the sun. A layer of cloud blocked the sun where I was, making the distant peaks look that much brighter. I stopped at a spot where I knew I’d have a good view of the mountain range.

It turned out to be a really interesting view, as you can see from the panorama below.

Wider view of the same snow covered mountains lit up by the sun, with clouds above them.
District Mountain Panorama

By lunchtime, the sky above was mostly clear, and clouds were bunched up against the mountains, completely blocking them. I was indoors most of the morning, but it seemed as if the cloud layer had just blown northward until it hit the mountains, then stopped.

Click on either image to go to its Flickr page.

Side Note: Stitching

Since Canon’s PhotoStitch no longer works on Snow Leopard, I’ve tried out Hugin again. It’s come a long way since I first tried to use it and spent hours just getting a panorama to break up spectacularly and went hunting for PhotoStitch on the disc that came with the camera! I can’t get it to automatically detect control points on Fedora, but it does a surprisingly good job even when I’ve only marked around 10 or so. The ability to customize things like which pieces appear in front of others, or which projection to use, has turned out to be useful as well.

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WTF?!? CNN reports: Tornado warning in effect for south central Los Angeles.

It turns out there’s a tornado warning in Orange County too. I can believe it.

Drove past Blizzard HQ during a thunderstorm. Saw a really nice lightning strike a few minutes later.

Got soaked walking out of the parking structure. Wouldn’t be so bad if the rain was coming straight down. Ducked into first restaurant I saw.

Oh, NOW the storm lets up while I’m INSIDE. Rain & sky are both lightening up, & I haven’t seen any lightning in at least 10 minutes.

Aaaand we now return you to your regularly scheduled California sunshine!

I glanced out the window while eating lunch at Johnny Rockets and saw this brilliant rainbow. I hastily told the server that I would be right back, and was just going to look at it, and left some of my stuff at the table while I came out and snapped a picture. A passing security guard remarked that he had the same idea, but didn’t have his camera. When I went back in, two of the employees were staring out the window at it.

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I spotted a great 22° halo around the sun this morning, almost by accident. There was a reflection in the rear window of the car in front of me that looked like it could be a distorted contrail or it could be a distorted halo. Once I parked, I looked — and there was this clear halo, almost 3/4 of the circle. The missing quadrant was to the lower right, so I just framed this to get as much of the visible part as I could.

It wasn’t really this blue. The G1 tends to make images in daylight a little extra blue, and seems to have really gone overboard on this one. I’ve got to remember to bring the regular camera with me more often!