Author: kenritley

“Alpenglow” — or, Pre-Sunrise Twilight Scattering

kenritley

This is the view I see from my balcony in the morning. That triangular peak just right of the middle is the Eiger — and it plays a prominent role in The Eiger Sanction in my opinion the BEST moving starring Clint Eastwood as an assassin who’s been contracted to kill another assassin in a group of people climbing the Eiger — but he doesn’t know which of the climbing party is his target. Lest you think Clint always places the nice guy, Clint could not figure out who specifically was his target — so he killed everyone by cutting a rope and letting them drop to their deaths. At the very end of the movie, Clint realizes that in fact his trainer — not one of the climbers — was his real target all along — but he lets him live.

I’ve lived in Switzerland now for 16 years, and the morning sky above the Alps never fails to impress me:

These colors are what is known as pre-sunrise twilight scattering. 

Because the view is towards the horizon, the physical effect called Raleigh Scattering means the blue light is scattered more strongly so that the red light shines through. But, that same blue light that has been scattered away interacts with the red light – causing purples! The formula is quite complicated, but in general the scattering cross section depends on the reciprocal of the wavelength (actually, wavelength**4),  so that blue light (λ≈450 nm) scatters about 10× more than red light (λ≈700 nm)!

 

Sunset over Corpus Christi

kenritley

Here the sun is setting and your first thought might be “oh, gee, the sun is setting” but my first thought was “quicksand – keep out or die.”  No joke – take more than two steps forward and archeologists will be unearthing your preserved body hundreds of years from now. I can’t speak for other states, but in Texas at least, wherever you find shallow bodies of waters (rivers included) you’ll find deadly quicksand. Once you start sinking, unless you know the right moves and execute them at the right time — you’ll be deader than a beaver hat in a rainstorm!

I took this snap from a vantage point that anyone familiar with South Corpus Christi will instantly recognize, but I keep it a secret here to avoid drawing the attention of unwanted tourists!

DDoS – Distributed Denial of Seagull Attack!

kenritley

This is a Texas grackle – a noble bird, for more civilized times. They inhabit the parking lots of Corpus Christi, working hard to scrounge for their food and keep the parking lots clean:

And these are fat, lazy supermarket seagulls – not the proud, respectable seagulls that fly along the beaches and hunt for fish, but rather fat seagulls that sit on the roofs of supermarkets in Texas – on their fat bird-asses – waiting until they see something to eat:

Well, I just didn’t think it was FAIR that the noble grackles work so hard for their food, only to have it violently seized by their fat-assed feathered breathren just before they can eat it. 

So . . . I started a DDoS – a Distributed Denial of Seagull Attack – in which I sprinkled some potato chips underneath the shopping carts, where the grackles could easily get to them – but the seagulls were just too big!

As we’d probably say in Texas: that’ll learn them fat-assed gulls, don’t mess with grackles!

Corpus Christi Sunset

kenritley

Here’s a nice snap I took of a sunset on a warm winter’s evening in Corpus Christi. You can see two effects that are not always visible: a round “22-degree” halo around the sun, where ice crystals in the atmosphere has scattered the light; and a horizontal line, called “crepuscular rays” or “horizon glow,” caused by refraction off the horizon:

Eagle Ford Shale

kenritley

Continuing the series, what is 50 miles wide, 400 miles long, and delivers 1.1 BILLION barrels of oil per day?

The Eagle Ford Shale in Texas!

Here “shale” is the operative word. Thanks to fracking, the production has increased from around 300’000 barrels per day ten years ago, to over a million today!

“Frack, baby, Frack!”