Monday, January 31, 2011

Weird sky/cloud formations

Early Sunday evening, I noticed some weird cloud formations -- or, perhaps, contrails/jet streams? -- in the west/southwestern sky while I was outdoors and happened to have my PowerShot G12 with me, so I took some pictures. Turns out ... I had a short window of opportunity to lock in on a color shade, as the setting sun and/or its reflected rays transformed the color of these formations from the usual bright white to a bronze tint in a span of 10 minutes or so during the time I was observing and photographing.

There probably is a perfectly good explanation for these helter-skelter patterns, and they probably are contrails. But of these streaks looked too wide and splayed for jet streams, and yet ... too narrow and too tubular for clouds. 

I did a quick hunt online, and not surprisingly found that weird cloud formations are not usual, but in the pictures of examples of "weird cloud formations," I didn't see any examples that resembled these helter-skelterlike skyscapes!

The image at the top is a broad overview of the spectacle; the one immediately below is a somewhat tighter look at the same composition. Both were taken before the aforementioned bronzing effect, the first of which you can see in the portrait orientation two shots below.




Above and the next two below: After the sunset/bronzing effect took hold. That tiny black figure to the right of the formation on the left is a passing aircraft. A crop of the above frame to bring out better detail of the aircraft appears below.
 
 



Above: This is not entirely a sunset bronzing effect; while I did capture this after the sunset started tinkering with the cloud colors, it's also the result of a PowerShot G12 in-camera melding of three images captured in rapid succession (also known as high-dynamic range, or HDR).

8 comments:

  1. Great post, Joe. I just took a video of the sky in Wilkesboro, North Carolina yesterday... same weird formations... and posted it on my status at facebook.com/direxa. Don't guess we'll ever really know what we saw, but thanks. :)

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  2. Beautiful photography. Google 'chemtrails' for the explanation. I'm surprised you've not yet heard of this! Pretty common knowledge.

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  4. I just seen these same type of formations in california yesterday and there was a really huge tunnel cloud that extended from one end of the sky to the other in a straight line...

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  6. There is a plane visible in some pictures but no contrails. those clouds looks like the ones described as chemtrails that lingers on after spraying. I have seen the planes with my own eyes spraying a town in Sweden. A politician has accused CIA for polluting our air with the consent from our government.

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  7. beautiful pictures of chemicals falling down on you. how unaware we are.

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  8. yeah mate its called geo-engineering, slang,chemtrails.the scientists are all saying its something they can look at doing to combat global warming which in itself is at a complete farce, but say it isnt happening at the moment. well we can see all around the world, it is happening and when asked how it would affect health, they say we don't know.thats why we aren't being told. aluminium oxide and berium oxide are just 2 of the chemicals found in soil and water samples in areas where this occurs. this is a criminal act that governments are complicit in.

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