Wonder of the Week: Low Autumn Light

Sherman granite near Blair picnic area, Laramie Mountains.

Now that it’s November, the days are short, temperatures are cool to cold, and the lighting is wonderful.  I love low autumn light.  It seems softer, warmer, much less harsh -- there's more color in the landscapes, more of interest. 

I live at 41º N (latitude).  On the summer solstice, June 21, the sun was 72º above the horizon at noon.  Yesterday, November 7, at noon it was only 32º above the horizon, so sunlight had to pass through more atmosphere, dimming it a bit.  Atmosphere scatters blue light more than red, so illumination is “warmer”.   Shadows are longer, more interesting.

Yesterday was really windy, and the quaking aspen were dancing!

For more information :

The U.S. Navy has a webpage that will generate a Sun or Moon Altitude/Azimuth Table for a given location.  For more on low light, see Atmospheric Extinction and Refraction and Photography in the Winter Season by Darren Rowse.

About Wonder of the Week -- a series of short posts with just a few photos and thoughts. The title is based on the dual-purpose nature of “wonder” (Oxford American Dictionaries):

noun --  “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable”

verb --  “... be curious to know something”

Blog Crawl Gems

This Week's Treasures

SOPA, PIPA  An email message arrived from Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi -- he is dropping his cosponsorship of PIPA.  He thinks PIPA would have been fine of course, but is listening to the public.  Also, he’s glad that Senator Reid did what Senator McConnell told him to do (amazing how easy it is to spin things into one’s preferred view of the world).

The Atavism shared a poem by Brian Turner about the joy of biking, the start of a very nice post about the joy of natural history.  A watchful naturalist has the opportunity for all kinds of wonderful surprises when out and about, like a tiger beetle that requires halting a brutal hill-climb.  TA made mention of Beetles in the Bush, a blog with beautiful photos of beetles, other insects, arachnids and miscellaneous creatures of interest.  BiB features a recent well-illustrated post by Chris Brown about a beetle that mimics caterpillar poop! BiB author Ted C. MacRae shares his favorite photos from 2011 with anyone who wants to download them (I did ... nice batch of new wallpaper).  

Hopefully one of these days I will have learned enough about bugs to admire them for more than their beauty.  To right: unknown beetle on unknown Tertiary basaltic/volcanic rock, Wild Rivers Recreation Area, New Mexico (roughly 2 cm long).

At Small Things Considered, Merry writes about another amazing weblet of life -- Green Flypaper.  The nodes of this weblet are flies, spiders, yeasts and bacteria ... and maybe even an antimicrobial-producing microbe.  Can you connect the nodes?  Hint -- these are social spiders that produce huge complex sweet-smelling webs.

Babbage of the Economist blogs about digital textbooks.  This seems such a no-brainer, but some folks still think the expensive paper ones are better:  “To compare passages in a text, for instance, students often skip back and forth between them. And sometimes they need to have several books open at once.”  uhhh ... these folks need to try some online resources.  The most obvious advantage of digital textbooks that I see (beyond price) wasn’t mentioned in the post -- ease of updating as new information becomes available.  UPDATE -- Babbage put up a new post on technology in education -- digital textbooks and beyond, including gaming.

Twinkle twinkle little star ... have you wondered what they are?  Earth Picture of the Day provides a dazzling time-lapse “jiggled” photo of Sirius twinkling -- actually it’s “seeing cells” that cause the twinkle.  For more on twinkling, go here.  String players and parents of string players -- is Suzuki's “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” playing in your head?  I found a classic example, complete with tape marking midpoint of bow and positions on fingerboard, and student very glad when the whole experience is over.

You might prefer “Twinkle Little Star”, a fine old-time fiddle tune played here by the great West Texas fiddler Homer Logan.

This week's Tip for Aging Baby Boomers comes from a paper published last week in Nature (article preview), and summarized in this week’s Economist.  Autophagy -- intracellular recycling -- is super important, so ramp up autophagy and get rid of those old mitochondria rife with free radicals.  The investigators found that autophagy increases with ... exercise!  How about that, here’s one of the mechanisms underlying the clear benefits of exercise.

GR courtesy FBNY.

Blog Crawl Gems

This Week's Treasures

If you’ve recovered sufficiently from the New Year’s carousing, you might enjoy the Botany and Spirits series that finished up last week at Botany Photo of the Day, including juniper (gin), sugar cane (rum), agave (tequila), hawthorne (a vodka flavoring) and especially interesting:  Baudoinia compniacensis, the angels' share fungus, which lives on the “angels’ share” of whiskey and other distilled products -- the part that is lost to evaporation during aging in wooden barrels.  Though common and widespread, angels’ share fungus was properly named only recently, following detective work to explain the black mold that was coating neighborhoods near Hiram Walker warehouses.  The story is told in detail in The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus.

Thanks to Ron Schott of Geology Home Companion for pointing me to What are the roots of geobotany? and the Utah Geological Survey blog.  He correctly guessed that a post on plants and rocks would interest me :)

Next, an article from Scientific American on some of the neat things to watch for in the sky in the year to come.  Joe Rao presents “The top 12 "skylights" for this coming year including a "double planet" in May and a Venus transit of the sun in June.”  This is a handy list for someone who loves to see cool astronomy things but is never able to keep track of what’s happening on a regular basis.  But I already slept through the first one -- Quadrantid meteor shower Wednesday morning before dawn.

Another great Earth Picture of the Day:  Brocken Spectre and Glory from Northern Italy.  Brocken is where the phenomenon supposedly was first reported -- the high point of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany.  This peak seems to have lots of mystical properties and phenomena associated with it, so it's not surprising that spectres were found there.  As Goethe wrote in 1808:

Now to the Brocken the witches ride;
The stubble is gold and the corn is green;
There is the carnival crew to be seen,

And Squire Urianus will come to preside.
So over the valleys our company floats,

With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

Click to see witches flying around the Brocken in this illustration
by draftsman L. S. von Bestehorn (1732; public domain).

There are more EPODs of Brocken Spectre and Glory here and here.  Many different optical effects are explained at Atmospheric Optics, a pretty neat web site that I stumbled upon.  Maybe one day I will encounter my shadow as a Brocken Spectre with a halo of Glory, that would be so cool!

Finally another tip for aging baby boomers to stay ahead of the grim reaper -- get up from that computer, sitting is killing you! followed by No Really - Sitting is Killing You (some readers were skeptical).

GR courtesy FBNY.