The smoke from the fires in California is filthying up the northern Utah skies. The scent is faint, but detectable… but the *sight* is obvious in both day and night. Not only is the muck in the air visible across the distances, it’s blisteringly obvious if you shine a flashlight up into the night sky.
This gives me and my compromised lungs a bit of an uncomfortableness.
This lasted only a few seconds after I noticed it, so I only got a few rather indifferent photos of it. They do *not* do it justice.
An agricultural ditch up the road makes for some interesting photos from time to time.
Sunset wasn’t so bad tonight.
Yesterday a blast of charged particles from a solar flare struck Earths magnetosphere a mighty blow, producing impressive aurora. However, while I was keeping an eye out for it, it showed up only very irregularly, and the best of it occurred while the moon was still up.
I’ve seen the northern lights her in Utah before, but it has always been just at the edge of naked eye visibility. But last night for just a moment, a bit of it really jumped out. Only barely caught it on camera, and then it faded away.
The night before I caught the Andromeda galaxy above a tree with a jetliner nearby. I was hoping the jetliner would go through Andromeda, but…
Here’s the neighborhood late last night looking west. The sky is lit up hell-red due to the lights from ATK and the moon beyond.
Some recent cameraphone (and thus kinda crappy) photos of the Utah sky…
And because why not, here’s Fingers late this afternoon looking down upon me from a perch. The cyst seems to be receding and she’s perking up, but she still runs away from me if I approach her. I guess she thinks I’m going to grab her and haul her back to the vet for more needle-stabbings.
Oy.
If the article is to be believed (who knows anymore), photos taken over the Russian city of Tyumen caused “panic” because some people believed they were looking at a nuclear explosion mushroom cloud:
As I said… oy. It’s like people have never seen clouds before.
Sigh.
And through sheer random chance, I saw this cloud today. Clearly this is a mushroom cloud from a smaller nuke, I’d estimate in the 40 to 50 kiloton range. Yeah.
A few days ago, looking out my back yard. Sure looks like a whole lot of water falling out of the sky, but it sure hasn’t been resulting in a whole lot of water hitting the ground.
A number of chunks of interstate in Utah were raised from 65 to 70 mph in December. Four month in, studies have shown that the average speed on the road has increased a paltry 2 mph, and no increase in speed-relate fatalities. The consensus seems to be that drivers were already going faster than 70… but the speed they were going at was pretty much the speed they wanted to go at, so raising the speed limit didn’t make it easier for people to go faster because they were already going as fast as they wanted to.
Now, compare this to *your* local government:
When UDOT raised the speed limit in December, part of the reasoning was that motorists were already driving 70 mph.
“People are driving the speeds that they’re most comfortable driving at,” UDOT spokesman John Gleason said. … The Utah Highway Patrol initially opposed the increase but now maintains a stance of enforcing the posted limit.
Compare and contrast with states, counties and municipalities that set up speed traps specifically to raise funds through tickets.
Past week or more has looked like rain, every day. But when the opportunity actually presents itself, all that has actually happened is some wind and a slight spattering or rain, not the gullywashers that the sky promises.
The panoramas below are mostly scaled down to 10% full size.
