Satellite imagery shows that the Russians seem to be packing up and going home, abandoning the”nuclear powered cruise missile” test site. The article suggests that this is because the missile isn’t working. Other explanations include that the Russians are simply testing elsewhere. In any event, some interesting photos here.
After a summer sky filled with smoke, dust and ash, in the last month or so the air has started to clear. Not all at once, and not completely, but at least the sky is usually *blue,* which for much of the summer it was not. below are some camera phone photos that aren’t half bad…
Go ahead and pretend this ain’t cool:
Photos taken at altitude a few weeks back showing the scale of the air pollution produced from the numerous wildfires in Utah, Nevada and California. The first three were from the outbound leg, from Salt Lake to Chicago:
The last three are from the return home, from Dallas to Salt Lake.
That last one shows how the ground vanished under a layer of smoke as the plane passed over the Wasatch/Uinta mountains (i.e. the Walls of Mordor). The mountains run north and south and provide a pretty effective block preventing lower level air pollution from being blown away.
Flying out of Chicago I caught sight of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. It’s an impressive sight, even though it is now relatively dinky compared to the likes of the Large Hadron Collider. It was shut down in 2011.
A couple photos I took during the nearly empty showing of “2001” in an IMAX theater a few weeks back. Nothing terribly meaningful, but possibly interesting. Looks like two projectors projecting the same thing. Without going to the hardship of Googling it and finding out for sure, my supposition is simply that two projectors create an image twice as bright as one projector. Possibly this is a 3D projector being put into service for 2D in this fashion. Gotta make sure that the projectors are aligned to a microscopic degree, though, or otherwise the image would be blurry.
Photos from a week or so ago. It has not meaningfully rained in months; the consequence is lots of dust and smoke in the air. On most levels that… well, it sucks. But within a certain subset of photography, it can result in some interesting shots.
The plane had to divert around this.
…National Park, from about 35,000 feet. Just freaky to see that thing out the window.
I took this photo about a year ago in an antique store in Salt Lake city. Always meant to post it but… meh. You know how it is… time flies when you’re rolling in cash, wallowing in success, fighting off hordes of frenzied female groupies and dealing with the ravages of self delusion.
Anyway, take a gander at what the decline in reason has accomplished:
Ugh.