Saturday!

zic in reply to Burt Likko says:

I’ll look when I need to come up for air and breath, Burt. I’m sort of overwhelmed. Totally reveling in being a nerd.

A few nights ago, I braved the cold, walked along the sidewalk under some mature pines at the corner of my yard, and noticed the moon up through the pine boughs, through a layer of thin cloud cover. I could see the expected circle of light in the clouds about the moon, it had an odd egg shape because the moon’s not full yet. Around the edges of the ring, I could a spectral rainbow, indigo on the inside through a narrow band of green, then a wider band of yellow fading through orange to red that was frizzed at it’s outer edge into the cloud, lit from underneath by light pollution from my village. I scurried to get out from the white pines for an unobstructed view, light changes incredibly quickly, equations involving the movements of earth, moon, sun, as well as the formation of cloud in the atmosphere. Unobstructed, the rainbow at the edges of the moon ring were gone, just silvery light in the thin cloud layer, I could see stars through. I stepped back under the pines, and the rainbow at the edges of the moonlight ring in the cloud reappeared. I did’t understand why, and I stepped back and fourth from under the pine for a few minutes, observing the phenomena, until it became too cold to stand so still.

Yesterday, I looked up out the window to focus my eyes distantly after a long bout of reading about Newton’s experiments with optics. From my chair next to the wood stove in my kitchen, I have a view across the village to the Androscoggin River valley, screened by the fringe of trees growing in the village, to the Mahoosuc Mountains at the horizon where the mountains meet the sky. Where the view was unobstructed by trees, the air above the river looked clear. But through the fringe of trees, I could see a faint mist hanging over the river, and where my view of the mist was interrupted by branches of giant maple and oak trees , I could see the thinnest band of rainbows it it. It was like the moon before; the obstruction revealed the refraction.

I’m still puzzling out light moving through moisture fringed by the branches of trees and the resulting rainbows. I think a similar phenomena happens when the afternoon sun shines through the wire mesh of my screen porch; but the hot bands of sunlight it scatters is far too bright directly observe rainbows at it’s edges, perhaps my camera will probably be able to observe it, so that’s an experiment in the works. I’ve been exploring light in atmosphere in lightroom, mostly using the luminosity settings to filter out the other colors of light that blend back toward white, You can see some of my early work in this G+ album..

Reading Quicksilver makes me feel glad to be a nerd. It’s often annoying to people, I love that my husband is that he’s rarely annoyed to be around as I figuring things out. He’s a Waterhouse through and through, and we’re both grateful that the need to each conduct our own research frees the time of the other for research, that’s one of the richest blessings in our marriage, and we spend a lot of time sharing our discoveries with each other.

I’ll dig into the archives when I take my next break, @burt-likko , and report back to the Ordinary Society (OS) with a brief comment or blog post, as the response warrants. Thank you for pointing it out, I’m grateful for the opportunity of conversation. Now there’s a wood fire and book in the other room I must return to.Report