Wendy kept bugging me to leave off making dinner to come outside to look at something so I turned the flame down low and came up to see the bottom of a bright rainbow just to the NE.
“Nice,” I said and started back down the companionway.
In her best She Who Must Be Obeyed voice she said: “Mark. Get out here.”
She was heading down the dock so I followed and at the end, past the masts and the motor yachts the full thing burst out, a soaring crystal etched across the dark sky.
I couldn’t help myself.
I took a few photos and a movie, and trotted back to the boat. Went to YouTube and I think you might be able to guess what I was searching for.
Yes, of course. The Yosemite Double Rainbow moment which has been seen about 33 million times. I cued it up, took the microphone down from my marine VHF radio, and blasted out about 30 seconds out to the anchored masses in Banderas Bay. On the main hailing channel.
A major no-no. Every so often you hear someone playing a bit of music, or making rude noises; kids probably. Inevitably someone comes back in a state of advanced irritation and tells them to can it. It really is a very rude thing to do.
But it seemed very funny and respectful at the same time. And the spectacle was deeply mind altering. So that’s my defense. Not the Twinkie defense. The Yosemite Double Rainbow defense.
I apologise to everyone who might have been offended. And delighted to have put a smile on Wendy’s face.
Ski hut in Norway under Northern Lights - Per Ivar Somby
The photo-sharing site Flickr is amazing.
This evening I read a news article about a powerful solar storm that is producing problems for planes and cellphones, and brilliant skies filled with spectral colors in the high latitudes.
Those of us in tropical latitudes are missing this rare spectacle - a display of aurora borealis - caused by a massive solar flare. But enough of that. I knew that Flickr – with its thousands of committed photographers – would have produced a worldwide record of the event almost instantaneously. And I was right. Continue Reading »
Let’s say you’ve been waiting for the waxing crescent moon to arrive. You have your reasons.
If you started waiting precisely at noon on the very day of the new moon, it would mean that for a couple of nights you might see nothing. But very few people would start their vigil on the precise moment of the birth of the new moon, which happens more or less at noon at the astronomical moment of the start of the lunar calendar, according to scientific convention.
I know, it’s complicated.
Waiting for it to get dark, you’d look up and of course there would be no moon. If the sky was clear, if you were in the mountains with no city lights to obscure even a faint fingernail of a moon, as darkness fell there would be no light from the moon. If you were on the ocean, waiting to see the moon, there would be no moonglades, as my brother Neal calls them. Continue Reading »
Simulation of the final moments of the Costa Concordia
Here is a very interesting conjecture from the Polish navigation technology firm NavSim, in the graphic to the left (and many thanks to John for the tip!)
It is a simulation of the final minutes of the Costa Concordia, and if essentially correct, tells a story about what accident investigators call ” a lapse of situational awareness”.
I used to think that the term was used as a euphemism for drunkenness in the cockpit. And that may not be far off the mark in this interesting tragedy.
