zodiacal light - the false dawn

Thanks to Jane for sharing this. In thinking about the faint amount of light that allows you to discern form in the darkness in my previous post depicting the night-time profiles of mountains, this phenomena  seems an interesting addition.

"Zodiacal light is a faint, roughly triangular, whitish glow seen in the night sky which appears to extend up from the vicinity of the sun along the ecliptic or zodiac. Caused by sunlight scattered by space dust in the zodiacal cloud, it is so faint that either moonlight or light pollution renders it invisible. The zodiacal light decreases in intensity with distance from the Sun, but on very dark nights it has been observed in a band completely around the ecliptic. In fact, the zodiacal light covers the entire sky, being responsible for 60% of the total skylight on a moonless night. There is also a very faint, but still slightly increased, oval glow directly opposite the Sun which is known as the gegenschein." (Wikipedia)

Zodiakallicht - Etienne Leopold Trouvelot

partial eclipse of a blue moon

(Image from flickr - moonmeister)

The curved shadow of Earth cast across the full moon. Being the 13th full moon of the year, it was a blue moon. An eclipsed blue moon is a one in a hundred year occurrence. Image taken on 31 December 2009

experiments and observations on different kinds of air**

The forthcoming exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham of the work of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva should be worth seeing. I was hugely impressed by them in Venice earlier in the year in their show experiments and observations on different kinds of air. In amongst the usual lagoon of mediocrity that can be found in Venice, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva in the Portugese Pavillion showed a series of short silent 16mm & 35mm films that held the viewer with a quiet beauty and poetry not found anywhere else in the national pavillions this year.

(Their films are) "the study of singular phenomena in an effort to understand the world, the affection of a scientific methodology, and the understanding of poetry as a possible means of capturing an only partially discernable world...

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva.
3 Suns, 2009, 16mm film, colour, no sound, 0’50’’

...Through their films and experiments, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva also invoke this hypothesis of other metaphysical abysms with a rather particular sense of humour. Recognising the failure of approximations of the real, they unpeel scientific absurdities to trace new laws in poetry. An adventure in "pataphysics" that presents what may be considered the greatest of all failures: the failure of the ego and its imprisonment, the impossibility of direct access to truth and a mocking and hallucinatory search, whose end is perceivably unreachable." (Natxo Checa)

**A title drawing on the work of the British chemist, physicist and theologian Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). He carried out experiments with electricity and air and for the first time isolated oxygen in a gaseous state. 

On the Movement of the Fried Egg and Other Astronomical Bodies will be on show at the Icon Gallery between 3rd February – 21 March 2010
 

cloud inversion & fogbow on Ben More

The mountain weather forecast suggested that perhaps the only good place to go today would be somewhere in the West Highlands, but south of Lochaber. We've climbed every Munro in Scotland south of Fort William, so Jim & I, unusually, decided to climb one we'd been up before, and ended up climbing Ben More (the Crianlarich one). This paid off as we found ourselves in a wonderful cloud inversion, saw our brocken spectre, and walked up to the col into a fog bow, (also known as a fog dog, cloud bow or white rainbow).

I've seen partial cloud inversions before, but they've been where I've been sandwiched between a high and a low layer of cloud, or have been above low lying mist in valleys, but this was my first bona fide cloud inversion with brilliant blue skies above, the cloud encircling the mountain. What a fantastic thing to experience. The battery on my camera had died, so all these photographs have been taken by Jim.