The Airliner Chronicles: Glory in the Skies (not a religious post, though)

Pilots and frequent fliers are no doubt familiar with the phenomena, but for infrequent fliers like myself (I will qualify for a free flight sometime in the middle or late Anthropocene epoch), this was new. We were headed east in the late afternoon approaching Las Vegas when I saw a strange optical effect in the clouds directly opposite from the sun. I could see a spectrum of colors, but it was most certainly not a rainbow, although some of the same optical physics principles turn out to be involved.

I zoomed on the colorful arc for a better look. I vaguely remembered hearing about the phenomenon but for the life of me I couldn't remember the name. It's called a "glory", or in more modern times, the "glory of the pilot". It happens when the observer has the sun behind, and clouds in front. Light is backscattered in the water droplets of the cloud and diffracted, and as such is similar to the formation of a rainbow, but is different in size and pattern. According to (the always dependable) sources on the Internet, the dynamics of the light pathways are not fully understood. It was first noted by mountain climbers, where it was associated with an apparently magnified shadow of the observer called a Brocken spectre. The climber will see the colorful arc surrounding their head like a halo.

Luckily, we were descending for our landing at Vegas, and we passed right through the clouds, so I was able to catch a few shots of the airplane version of a Brocken spectre: the glory around the shadow of the plane we were in. It was small at first, but then we passed right next to a tall cumulus cloud, and the image was much larger (below). The placement of the glory actually reveals what part of the plane I was sitting in!

The Airliner Chronicles is one of my on-again/off-again serial features, which is usually updated whenever I fly somewhere.

A Few Snapshots for a Saturday: High Water in Yosemite

I've been to Yosemite Valley many, many times, so when I visit these days, I resolve to seek out the more unfamiliar corners and sort of skip past the things I've photographed a few hundred times. So it was with the iconic Tunnel View that everyone stops at. I was driving past it on the way to Glacier Point, but something caught my eye, something I had not ever seen before. Orange and yellow water flying out the base of Bridalveil Fall!

It was a rainbow, of course, as we drove by at just the perfect moment in the afternoon. It was a fascinating sight.

Bridalveil Fall is a classic example of a glacial hanging valley. The main glacier in Yosemite Valley was able to carve deeper than the tributary glacier in Bridalveil Creek, so the bottom of Bridalveil Creek stands more than 600 feet higher than the floor of Yosemite Valley.

The water was flowing at a seasonal high, and Bridalveil runoff was not sticking to the usual channels; it was flowing over the trail and through the parking lot, and the creek in the picture below was only one of three overflowing distributaries coming off the base of the fall. "Rain" was falling everywhere around the fall, and everyone hiking to the viewpoint came back soaked.
We came by in the twilight and had the falls more or less to ourselves. Bridalveil Fall and the adjacent Leaning Tower are two of the spots that make Yosemite a special place!

A Rainbow Meme! I'll Play Along

A rainbow meme! It's only fair to join in since you all were so willing to discuss trees and all, so here are a few of my favorite rainbows, although two of them are more properly fallbows. It is kind of fun to go searching through all those photos that got taken in between geology shots.

The first was taken in the Sierra foothills at the beginning of a Yosemite trip. It was spectacular, but it also meant there was a storm, and warm as it was in the San Joaquin Valley that day, by the time we got to camp at 5,500 feet, we were in rain about 300-400 feet below the snow line...it was cold and wet!

The second shot is at the base of Yellowstone Falls in Yellowstone National Park. A double rainbow...

The third is at the base of Vernal Falls in Yosemite National Park. The Mist Trail is a great hike in the spring and early summer, but you are gonna get wet!