Every once in a while, I manage to get a decent shot with my cell phone camera (currently a RAZR V3T).
Taken August 4 at 6:20pm. Cleaned up slightly to remove a digital glitch just above the cloud.
Tag: clouds
Invasion of the Lenticular Clouds!
I wasn’t expecting to see more after my last post on lenticular clouds. As I said, they’re (usually) rare in this area. But as I left the office Friday evening, I pulled onto the freeway and nearly freaked out at what I saw: A line of three smooth, layered clouds running above the ridge of the mountains to the north of Saddleback, and two more less-defined clouds picking up south of the peaks. I took the first exit and headed for a spot where I knew I could get an unobstructed view: a park in the Quail Hill area. (Knollcrest, I think.)
It was near sunset, and I was in a hurry to get some photos (not to mention a better chance to look at them!) before the light faded. You can see that the sun had already dropped behind the hill on which I was standing.
If you look at the horizon in the wide view, near the left at what looks like the base of the hills, you can see the orange balloon at the Great Park. I’m fairly sure they’d stopped taking people up by then, though I did see it airborne during my walk at lunch.
I’ve enhanced the contrast on these next few images, all cropped from the same photo to show close-ups (relatively speaking) of the three clouds:
I’m going to do something unusual here, and post an original-resolution copy of that contrast-enhanced photo, just ’cause it’s so cool. It compressed really well, to 170K, but beware—it’s still a 2,567 pixel–wide image.
Into the Storm
Here’s a photo from the same April rainstorm in which we spotted the red rainbow at sunset:
This was taken about an hour earlier, driving up the 405.
Lenticular Cloud Over Irvine
One of the problems with photographing clouds is that you can’t run and grab a better camera. You have to shoot with what you have, or they’ll change configuration and quite possibly look completely different by the time you get back.
As I left for a late lunch today, I saw a set of half-discs stacked together, with a long trail stretching off to the left. We don’t see lenticular clouds that often in this area, so I stopped the car, grabbed my cell phone and aimed it out the window.
The Santa Ana Mountains are hidden behind the office buildings, and are probably the cause of the cloud formation.
Unfortunately, the detail isn’t that great. I tried to enhance the image a bit, but it looks like the brightest parts of the cloud overwhelmed the sensor. This is at the camera’s native resolution:
Update: Spotted some more interesting cloud formations later in the afternoon. Continue reading
Contrail Shadow
With any luck I’ll finally post about last week’s trip to Las Vegas soon, but meanwhile, here’s something interesting that we spotted a couple of times on the drive back: The shadow of a contrail against the sky.
Here’s what it looked like, as the camera saw it. Actually, it was much more visible at the start. It faded considerably in the time it took to get the camera out and snap the photo.
And here it is with the contrast enhanced. You can see a dark line extending across the sky from the end of the trail down to the lower left. The sun was at the upper right, almost but not quite in line with the trail at that point.
Atmospheric Optics has a huge collection of cloud shadows, rays, rainbows, ice halos, and more, including a diagram of how contrail shadows work.
Cloud Window
This morning I looked north and saw a narrow band of mountains sandwiched between two layers of clouds. The first place I could stop to take a photo, the lower layer was mostly blocked by hills, but you can still see it.
As a bonus, this turned out to be nearly the same shot as one of the photos I posted under Snowblogging four weeks ago (reposted here):
The lighting isn’t as good in today’s photo, since it was overcast, but you can really see the effect several weeks of one-day-a-week rain have had on the hills. They’ve gone from brown with splashes of green to green with splashes of brown!
Sunrise, Sunset
The first photo is from Wednesday morning around 8:00. Katie took it on our drive to work. There’s actually another shot that shows more of the sky, but this one is more striking. The second shows tonight’s sunset as seen from the Metro Pointe parking lot. Yes, it’s a freeway in the foreground, but the sunset itself was incredible. Both thumbnails are linked to larger copies of the photos.
Finally, here are some vaguely lenticularish clouds I saw looking north at sunset on Friday. This one’s full-size already:
