Saturday, December 29, 2012

The End of 2012

The new edition of the Mayan Calendar has hit shelves just in time for New Years, this one features cats.

The near full moon the last couple of nights has produced a moon ring. I've seen these several times and always thought of the folklore about impending rain, snow, or ice. The amount of stars trapped in the halo is the amount of days to the next storm.




I noticed two this week. The first being a fairly bright ring and on the eve of some expected precipitation, although it never showed.

This was one of the brighter moon rings I've seen and the first time I noticed the rainbow effect.  It faded before I could get to the wide angle lens.


This ended up being a difficult 16 shot panoramic that I could never get the physics correct on.  I took these with my fixed Nikkor lens and even with the wide angle, would have had problems catching it all.
























Then three days later, a similar effect with a full moon.  That's Jupiter in the upper right corner.

1-3 inches of snow are rumored for New Years Eve in a couple of days and will prove an interesting end to an interesting storm chasing drought plagued year.

In the next couple of days, I'll post my favorite shots of this year.

Thanks for riding along.

Saturday, December 15, 2012