Tag: California

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Saturday night we went out to the Redondo Beach pier just in time to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. One thing that I found a bit odd was that it appeared to be setting behind a line of distant mountains. While the coast does curve westward at Santa Monica, I was pretty sure that due west of us was nothing but sea, though I figured it could have been the Channel Islands, or a very sharply-defined cloud bank.

So I did what any geek would do: looked up the angle at which the sun had set that evening.

I found two tools: The NOAA solar position calculator let me figure out, given latitude, longitude and time, the sun’s declination. Then I found another tool that let me enter the latitude, longitude, and compass bearing and see a line drawn on a map.

It turned out that the sun was setting roughly 21° north of due west, putting it roughly in line with the coast from Malibu toward Ventura…on the seaward side. The line finally connected with land out toward Point Conception, roughly 120 miles away. That’s probably too far away to be visible from near sea level, depending on how high the mountains are out there, but if the angle was off just a little bit (I did estimate the time), it could easily have be the Santa Monica mountains above Malibu (more like 20 miles).

So yes, I did watch the sun set over the ocean and over land at the same time!

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A couple of weeks ago I just had to get out of the house for an afternoon and found myself at the entrance to Peters Canyon Park. The last time I’d been there, the park was closed due to recent rains. This time, it was open.

Several trails run from the entrance around the edge of the park, and one goes inward to an area that’s currently closed off. Because…well…take a look:

Damaged sign: Warning - Mountain Lion Country

I couldn’t help but take a picture. It went so perfectly with this sign I found in Hawaii near the active lava flows: Continue reading →

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Well, technically, during a lull in the storm. The clouds were moving very fast, with light and shadow moving over the empty fields and office parks, and I waited several minutes for the sun to play over this scene.

I particularly liked the contrast of the dead brown tumbleweeds scattered around the bright green meadow.

My one regret with this photo is not being able to capture the steep drop-off into a wash right below the frame. I could get the wash, or the sky, but not both.

The large barn-like structure used to be a packing house for the Irvine Ranch farms, and is now split between a motel (the La Quinta Inn) and a group of restaurants.

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It’s cool that sunset/sunrise can make distant mountains stand out in silhouette even when they fade into the haze in broad daylight. The San Gabriels to the north, the Santa Monica Mountains to the northwest, Signal Hill Palos Verdes* to the west, and even a small segment of Catalina Island to the southwest were all visible, though I don’t remember seeing any of them during the day today.

I remember riding in a shuttle back from LAX once before dawn, and I could swear that I could see the silhouette of the San Jacinto Mountains from Los Angeles. They’re out near Palm Springs. Not exactly something you normally see from LA.

*There’s a wedge-shaped hill that’s visible in the west from north Orange County on really clear days. Somehow I had it in my head that it was Signal Hill, but I noticed when I went to Long Beach Comic Con a few weeks ago that (a) I passed the city of Signal Hill on the way to the con and (b) the hill I can see from Orange County was still visible to the northwest from Long Beach. Thanks to Google Earth for helping me figure out just what hill it actually was!