Here’s another view of just the bright spot effect hovering over the clouds, so you can see it without all the other distractions.

There are times when I’m flying and the clouds are just right to focus the suns light into a bright spot that follows the plane for several minutes. It is clearly some sort of reflection or refraction of the sun. What I like here is that you can see the sun, the sun’s reflection off the wing, the weird cloud effect *and* some lens flare so you can tell that the weird sun thing isn’t just in the lens. I could see it with the unaided eye … and now you can too.

Even though the new camera can see “colour” in infrared, I still prefer the high-contrast black and white look. As a bonus, it can make innocuous things, like this new coloured pencil fence, look kinda old and creepy.

Two odd things about infrared cameras:

1) Even thought blue is well outside of the IR range, some things that are blue to the human eye get picked up as blue by the converted camera. I did some testing and I’m pretty sure that this is how this particular camera sees deep infrared. I have no idea why visible blue also reflects as deep IR, but it does.

2) Some lenses have hotspots, where the infrared light hits the sensor and bounces off to hit the rear of one of the elements of the lens (somewhere in front of the aperture) and bounces back to get detected again. In the final image, this shows up as a ghostly light, usually in the center of the frame. This effect usually just shows strongly up at certain aperture settings.

In this case, both effects worked to my advantage.

After playing with one camera that had an infrared range that went into the visible (orange -> deep IR) and one that only did deep infrared, I thought I should convert one to a wider range of infrared, but one that was entirely invisible to the human eye.

This is what the Minnehaha Falls look like when you can’t look at them.

Water is AMAZING!

Somewhere, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the deserted US states, there is a place where three lights shine brighter than the sun.

Really, there is. And this is literally all I know about the place. They seem to be three tall tower assemblies that … reflect light up to passing planes? I don’t know. The place was at least 45 miles away. I was lucky to photograph what I did. I’m honestly surprised that I was able to clean up the haze in the photo enough for it to look this clear.

Any of you have any ideas?

Sometimes you see a beautiful sunset.

Sometimes you only have an infrared camera.

While out on the kayak, we went near the current NASA launch site. It was quite far away, but seeing it made 12 year old me rather happy.

Island and moonrise in the infrared spectrum.

Continuing the something a little different.

As noted earlier today, I’ve been making charts to sort of document the way I deal with stress. Others seem to think they’ll be useful so I am sharing them here. This one presumes that you’ve already checked on general health, and focuses more on general issues.

If you want the full size, click through to Flickr. Then look at the bottom right for the download icon. Click that, then click “original”. It’ll download an image that you should be able to print onto an 11″ x 17″ piece of paper relatively easily. If I wind up making more of these in the future, I may collect them all up into a PDF, but that seems stupid for just two diagrams.

Something a little different today.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking to lots of people who, like me, are feeling the stress of living in world/country that seems to make less sense every day, where hope is harder to find and fighting grows exhausting. It is not uncommon to hear people say that they couldn’t get to sleep because they were thinking about this or that. As I had these discussions, it slowly dawned on me that, while I had developed a rather algorithmic approach to parts of my life, many people hadn’t.

So, I created this little flow chart, based on some of the readings I’ve done and observations I’ve made over the last couple of decades. Some friends say it looks useful, so I am sharing it here so it automatically filters out to all of my various social media sites.

Another one will post later this afternoon.

If you want the full size, click through to Flickr. Then look at the bottom right for the download icon. Click that, then click “original”. It’ll download an image that you should be able to print onto an 11″ x 17″ piece of paper relatively easily. If I wind up making more of these in the future, I may collect them all up into a PDF, but that seems stupid for just two diagrams.

California road design apparently involves someone noticing that several highways were going to collide with each other and circled the area on the map to call attention to it, then someone just turned the circle into a road and called it done.

No idea which city this is. It’s east of L.A., but then again, many cities are.

Still, I think it’s a neat view.