If our eyes could look deep into space we’d see the clouds in this stellar nursery in the Centaurus constellation, 6,500 light years away.
This pink glowing nebula and clouds of dust were photographed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at Cerro Paranal, Chile. The nebula’s formal name is IC 2944. Because it’s visible to the naked eye it has a nickname too: The Running Chicken Nebula.
According to ESO’s description, the clouds are Thackeray globules “under fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot young stars.”
Click here or on the image to find out what will happen to the clouds.
If you know where to look on a clear night, you can see a running chicken in the sky.
Red-breasted mergansers in flight (photo by Shawn Collins)
24 November 2014
While seven feet of snow fell on parts Buffalo, New York last week, the birds on Lake Erie did their best to avoid the storm. Thousands of them flew away.
On 18 November 2014 the lake effect snow storm was so localized that it hammered communities south of Buffalo but barely snowed Downtown. Alfonzo Cutaia recorded this amazing wall of white picking up moisture from the lake and carrying it away from Downtown Buffalo.
The severe winter storm that was hitting the Buffalo area continued out over the lake until at least 0800 hours [with] heavy storm clouds and whiteout conditions about a mile out on the lake. This may have been the reason for a massive movement of waterfowl this morning, especially Red-breasted Mergansers. Except for Redheads which were mainly moving east, most ducks were moving west.
He counted 11,400 red-breasted mergansers flying toward Cleveland, away from the storm.
The ducks escaped but I can only wonder what happened to the songbirds. I hope they left on Tuesday during the first break in the three-day storm.
What’s the weather going to be like this winter? NOAA’s Climate.gov has a prediction.
If you live in the U.S. West, Alaska, or northern New England, chances are you’ll be warmer than normal. In the south-central and southeastern U.S. you’ll probably be colder.
But as the map text explains, the white zones aren’t necessarily going to be “normal.” There’s an equal chance of being hot, cold or lukewarm in Pennsylvania. We’ll just have to live through it to find out.
This one-to-two day cold snap won’t seriously reduce invasive insects but it may zap a few bugs caught unexpectedly outside their lairs. Every little bit helps.
And one more thought in case you aren’t convinced. There are no poisonous snakes in Alaska and very few in Canada and northern-border U.S. states.
Winter is a great pest control system.
p.s. It also reduces human pests. No teenagers are “partying” tonight in the park across the street.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license. Click on the image to see the original)
Yesterday afternoon I was caught in a graupel storm.
I was standing on Bellefield Avenue looking at the Cathedral of Learning through binoculars when the clouds darkened, the wind increased and it started to rain. I was trying to find the peregrines.
The rain turn white and then, between the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel, it didn’t come down. It floated up. What was this?
A woman ran past me talking on her cellphone, “I’ve got to hang up. It’s hailing out here.”
Why was it hailing in 46 degree weather without a thunderstorm?
When I got home I looked up the NOAA weather forecast discussion which said, “Shortwaves combined with cold air aloft will bring scattered showers to the region today. Some isolated graupel is also possible.”
Graupel is a German word for “precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water collect and freeze on a falling snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm ball of rime.”(*)
The balls look like hail but they’re fluffier. No wonder they were floating on the updraft at the Cathedral of Learning.
It wasn’t hailing. It was graupeling.
(photo of graupel in Elko, Nevada via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)
(*) definition from Google. By the way, “graupel” fails all my spell-checkers so I’m guessing that “graupeling” is spelled with one L as is normal when adding ‘-ing’ to ‘el’ in American English.
It was brilliantly sunny with a chilly east wind when I hiked at Schoodic Peninsula on the coast of Maine last Wednesday. Little did I know the conditions were perfect for a superior mirage.
Schoodic is one of the endless procession of peninsulas and islands that reach into the Gulf of Maine east of Acadia National Park‘s Cadillac Mountain. Though Schoodic is part of the park it takes an hour and a half to drive there around Frenchman Bay.
That day from the top of Schoodic Head the nearby islands and peninsulas were undistorted but on the horizon the land looked really odd. One pink granite island was shaped like an hourglass and a peninsula looked sparsely tree-covered with a flat top.
This was a “superior mirage,” so called because the upside down images are above the real objects. They are typical in cold water zones where the inversion of warm air above cold air distorts the light. When very complex they’re called Fata Morgana, an Italian reference to the sorceress Morgan le Fay, because reality is distorted as if by magic.
Mirages are so common in the Arctic that explorers learned to be very careful before they labeled what they saw as solid land. In 1818 Sir John Ross gave up pursuing the Northwest Passage when he saw mountains blocking Lancaster Sound. He named them the Croker Mountains and headed back for England despite the protests of several of his officers including Edward Sabine (for whom the Sabine’s gull is named). The mistake ruined Ross’ career. Eighty-eight years later Robert Peary thought he saw a distant land mass and named it Crocker Land. It too was a mirage. Beware of naming anything in the Arctic with the letters C, R, O, K, E, R. It doesn’t turn out well.
Even spookier: A re-examination of testimony surrounding the sinking of the Titanic indicates a mirage may have hidden the iceberg from the Titanic’s lookout and hidden the Titanic from the nearest rescue ship. Click here for illustrations that show how this could happen.
Mirages change quickly so I was able to snap only one good image before it became less interesting. I was fascinated but not fooled.
What does it mean when there are waves in the sky?
These altocumulus undulatus clouds form at mid height at the spot where moisture meets wind shear. Straight above my camera the wind abruptly changed direction and speed. The long lines are perpendicular to the strongest wind, just like waves on a lake.
Altocumulus undulatus are typically only 300 feet wide so the wind shear here is a narrow zone. If you flew through these clouds you’d probably feel a bump.
The waves might mean something big is about to happen … or not. If they thicken over time, they indicate that moisture is building ahead of an approaching front 100 to 200 miles away. If they cover only a small part of the sky, they merely mean that something’s going on right there.
p.s. If the video plays haltingly on your computer, click on the HD letters at bottom right of the video window to turn off High Definition which requires lots of bandwidth.
After a week of daily thunder and heavy rain we’re finally getting a spate of clear weather. Today’s interesting thunder facts can’t be applied immediately but we’ll get another chance before long.
We’re all familiar with the crack of lightning and thunder’s low rumbles. Sometimes we hear another loud bang in the middle of the series. Why does thunder rumble and what are those mid-bangs about? I found an explanation at the UK’s Weatheronline website.
First, let’s review the basics about light and sound. Lightning travels at the speed of light, thunder at the speed of sound. There’s such a time lag between them that we can figure out how far away the lightning is by counting the seconds between the flash and the sound, 5 seconds per mile.
The initial thunderclap is the closest part of the lightning but (amazingly!) the bolt itself is several miles long. We see it flash in twists and turns, branches and offshoots. Every piece makes a thunderclap but many of the parts are so distant they sound like rumbles instead of booms.
What’s the bang in the middle? It might be a new lightning bolt but … it could be the same bolt zigzagging closer as it travels through the sky. The closest part is that middle bang. Click here for an illustration showing how sound lags within a single lightning bolt.
Thunder rumbles because lightning is not a short, contained flash. If it was we would hear a single loud boom, like the boom of an electrical transformer blowing up on the pole outside your house. (I’ve experienced this!)
And here’s a cool note about the photo: Do you see the birds flying below the cloud? It’s actually only one bird! The lightning flashed four times while the shutter was open so the bird appears four times as it flies through the storm. Brave bird!
p.s. To see all four bird images, click here for the annotated photo with a yellow box.
(photo of lightning in Switzerland by Hansueli Krapf via Wikimedia Commons)
The weather has been so up-and-down lately that it’s hard to dress for birding. At home my winter clothes are piled in stacks, waiting to be washed after I pulled out summer shirts for last week’s 87 degrees.
Now the summer clothes are in stacks and I’ve yanked sweaters out of the winter pile. It’s 42 degrees this morning and will be 37 at dawn tomorrow.
What to wear for outdoor activities this month? It’s a wardrobe challenge.
p.s. It’s more than a wardrobe challenge for swallows, purple martins, chimney swifts and nighthawks. It can be life-threatening. These species eat flying insects which don’t fly when it’s cold. Fortunately the next two days will be sunny with highs of 62 and 71 so the insects will be flying later in the day. If you missed it, read here about purple martin landlords providing supplemental feedings in cold weather.
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