Being in the right place and right time for nature to blow your mind

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Initially thought of posting this on the 'solar storm' thread but it deserves its own -- over time I've been lucky enough to be in certain places at certain instances where everything connects, like the time I was standing on San Juan Island watching the sun set into the Pacific behind Vancouver Island. One of those literal 'you had to be there' moments.

Well, I was just now blessed with one. Walking home from breakfast, I looked up to notice the sun -- the fog's been thick enough today, and all the recent brushfires have added more smoke and murk to the air. Ash has been gently falling all morning, for instance. The result was to make the sun not look the usual pale yellow it does when trying to shine through a fog, but a vivid red-orange.

As I looked, I blinked to make sure I wasn't seeing things -- and there they were, the two monstrously huge sunspot clusters that have been noticed vis-a-vis the solar storm. One was a third of the way from the top of the sun, the other near the bottom, perfectly visible to the naked eye. Had there been less fog or less smoke or whatever, there was no way I could have seen them, and if I hadn't been wandering around outside just at that moment, I would have missed them.

I kept looking at them as I could on my way back home, and the feelings of sheer cosmic insignificance were both overwhelming and weirdly gratifying. It gave you a real sense of how far away the sun is, its vastness, and how spectacularly large those sunspots have to be in order to be so visible -- and yet the fact that I could turn from that to look down Bristol Street and the business signs and trees and all that made me feel very lucky to have been there to see it, even in such a theoretically banal setting. Quite, quite striking.

The fog is starting to lift more and more now and I think that'll be it for the day. But no question about it, right place, right time, hit the jackpot. What such moments -- here on the ground, in the sky, both, whatever -- have you been fortunate to notice?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 25 October 2003 15:48 (twenty-two years ago)

Wow. Those sun-sopts were the size of Jupiter...

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Saturday, 25 October 2003 17:52 (twenty-two years ago)

* Mir arcing across the sky on Christmas Day.
* Hale-Bopp, though it was there for months, but no one would believe me when I pointed it out to them.
* Any night I can see Orion in all it's glory is great (not so easy here, coz of the light pollution and all that)

I still have yet to see any meteor showers as they always co-incide with cloudy nights, it seems :(

I love that feeling of insignificance.

― jel -- (jel), Saturday, 25 October 2003 18:14 (twenty-two years ago)

was driving home the other day bout 5:30pm, post-rainfall atmosphere, overcast - when i got to a certain point, the sky was neatly bisected into this block of slate gray curtaining the warm red early evening glowiness behind. i like mundane beauty.

― mitch lastnamewithheld (mitchlnw), Saturday, 25 October 2003 18:21 (twenty-two years ago)

I've seen one meteor shower, which was very special indeed. If I head to a particular piece of beach, sheltered by cliffs and such, on a clear night you can see the pale smear of the Milky Way cross the entire skyscape, which is very impressive; not stars, but the distant light of hundreds of millions of stars.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Saturday, 25 October 2003 18:25 (twenty-two years ago)

Every time I go to Central Park, nature -- or nature filtered through Olmstead & Vaux's vision -- blows my mind.

― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Saturday, 25 October 2003 18:39 (twenty-two years ago)

By far the most spectucular celestial event I've witnessed in my life was one evening in Sheffield, 1995/6. As I walked out of the library, everyone was just staring up at the sky. The slate blue sky covered with a patchwork of purple sections. Only seen in the South Yorkshire area, I can't even remember what the local weather report that night said it was. Something very rare, anyway. It was the unheralded nature of it that made it so special. Somehow, waiting for an eclipse or going to Lapland to see the Northern Lights wouldn't be the same.

We saw a shooting star the other day. I think that's only my second ever.

― N. (nickdastoor), Saturday, 25 October 2003 20:23 (twenty-two years ago)

We saw the Aurora Borealis when it went on tour down to Michigan.

heh. in fact, I saw it whilst hanging out an a friend's house, the same where we'd see a coupla UFOs a few years later.

...but that is ANOTHER story...

― Kingfish (Kingfish), Saturday, 25 October 2003 21:21 (twenty-two years ago)

south point, big island, hawaii, june.

― amateurist (amateurist), Saturday, 25 October 2003 21:22 (twenty-two years ago)

my dad for a while worked on the Tohono O'Odham reservation west of Tucson, they have a big observatory there and the few towns that are in the area have special lights so as to not contribute light pollution. I grew up in the rural desert, but seing the stars on the rez is another magnitude of dizzy wonderfulness.

I am pretty easily dumbfounded by a piece of limestone or a red maple leaf in autumn or kitty whiskers.

― teeny (teeny), Sunday, 26 October 2003 03:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Just last weekend here in Winnipeg at a place called the Fort Whyte Center, got to witness something that has been happening in the southwest corner of town probably since sometime in the '50s - huge numbers of Canada geese, ducks and other waterfowl coming in to rest for the night on the ponds at the center after a long day of migratory travel (the ponds were formed during a flood in the '50s. They were gravel pits before that). At certain times it almost looked like there were huge swarms of insects in the air there were so many birds, and against the backdrop of a fiery prairie sundown it was pretty spectacular. Sadly I wasn't able to photograph the moments when the birds were really coming in, but at an earlier point it looked something like this.

― Bryan (Bryan), Sunday, 26 October 2003 03:55 (twenty-two years ago)

V. nice photo!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 26 October 2003 03:57 (twenty-two years ago)

― Orbit (Orbit), Sunday, 26 October 2003 05:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Try again, Orbit (damned ISP), and thanks Ned!

― Bryan (Bryan), Sunday, 26 October 2003 05:17 (twenty-two years ago)

wow, I've never seen a sky that red!

― jel -- (jel), Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:11 (twenty-two years ago)

I need to get some image hosting. I've got some pictrures that would fit this thread beautifully.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:17 (twenty-two years ago)

Take a regular floppy disk, crack it open, take out the filmy thing (the dark filmy thing, not the white one)... look at the sun through it. Voila!

― Mandee (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:38 (twenty-two years ago)

http://science.nasa.gov/spaceweather/aurora/images2003/22oct03/venhaus1.jpg

― Mandee (Jerrynipper), Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:45 (twenty-two years ago)

:-)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Okay, Ned, as your eponymous thread reveals, there is much love for you out in ILXland. Therefore you know this is meant in the spirit in which it is meant ("Is this the party to whom I am speaking?")....

DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN!!!! repeat DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN!!! Doesn't matter, cloudy, bright, hazy, overcast, hawaiian tropic, sunglasses, whatthefuckever, DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN!!!

Did I mention, DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN!!!????!!!!

There.

I did see a meteor shower once and it was spectacular. The sun setting over Ia on Santorini is awesome, in the 18th century sense. Haven't seen any aureora bor. activity, but I'd like to.

― Skottie, Sunday, 26 October 2003 12:57 (twenty-two years ago)

This is why I wear glasses with UV protection that also get dark in sunlight anyway *and* why I wouldn't have done it in the first place if it wasn't so thickly obscured over regardless. Though ultimately your advice is sound and one day I'll have to face the fact that I'm dead.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:05 (twenty-two years ago)

Don't follow the light! Stay away from the liiiiiiggggghhhhtttt!!!!

― Skottie, Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:07 (twenty-two years ago)

FEAR

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Mandee, that is not red.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:08 (twenty-two years ago)

I spend one hour each day staring directly into the sun just to piss the the AUTHORITIES and I feel fine

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:21 (twenty-two years ago)

looking at the sun in dim fog is classic enough, i would love to have been able to see the sunspots

the solar eclipse of '99 was pretty cool - i was at home and just stood in my back garden at 1pm doing the 'hole thru sheet of paper projected onto second sheet' thing to see the black dot that was the moon obscuring the sun. it felt very twilighty and peaceful and it was fairly clear weather in London unlike down in Cornwall, ha ha

a friend and i were sitting in a back garden and just after we casually noticed Mars hanging low in the sky we both turned at the same time and caught a shooting star soar across to the right - 0.3 second visibility but still great. watching satellites zoom across the sky on a very clear night also cool.

would really like to see the Northern Lights

― stevem (blueski), Sunday, 26 October 2003 13:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Bryan's picture is just another reason why I really need to visit prairieland some day.

DON'T LOOK AT THE SUN

well, of course. but you can look "at" the sun by looking near it and not directly into it. and at sunset it's less of a problem.

over time I've been lucky enough to be in certain places at certain instances where everything connects, like the time I was standing on San Juan Island watching the sun set into the Pacific behind Vancouver Island. One of those literal 'you had to be there' moments

I've had many such, though it's been a long time. It helps to put yourself in the right places by going out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of days.

wrt the Pacific NW, you might be interested in Richard Nelson's The Island Within, an anthropologist's account of time spent on an uninhabited island near his home on the Northwest coast (which isn't quite the same as the San Juans). I've never gotten down to reading it, and it seemed a bit new agey for this genre (which I'm something of a fan of, at least wrt Barry Lopez, who is definitely worth reading for his examination/illustration of such connections - start perhaps with his Desert Notes/River Notes?), but it was recommended to me and has its adherents.

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Sunday, 26 October 2003 17:44 (twenty-two years ago)

Once when I was out walking my dog in Inverness, I saw the most spectacular display of the Northern Lights. There was a red circle in the middle of the sky almost directly above me, with spoke-type things radiating out of it as far as the eye could see. Simultaneously, the rest of the sky was turning green and white and pink and blue and I just stood open-mouthed and wished I had a camera with me. When I got to school I told my teacher and he said it was a corona, which is a very rare aurora phenonenom and I was immensely lucky to have seen such a display in the UK (note, I went to school over a hundred miles south of Inverness so my teacher couldn't have seen it himself. It was like a cross between that picture Mandee posted, and this
http://nsidc.org/arcticmet/images/basics/phenomena/corona3s.gif

― ailsa (ailsa), Sunday, 26 October 2003 17:55 (twenty-two years ago)

What such moments -- here on the ground, in the sky, both, whatever -- have you been fortunate to notice?

sunset in a canyon in Utah after three days spent hiking with a teen backpacking group to the canyon rim, descending 1200 ft down to the canyon floor near the lower end of its 30 miles, two miles from where it gets flooded by Lake Powell before approaching Cataract Canyon and the Colorado River, exploring and bouldering in a rock garden of a side canyon, hiking a ways up the main canyon's length and returning, and then exploring a bit downstream (down-trickle really) where the canyon narrows as it approaches the Lake/bathtub, tan/red sandstone and beach-like washes giving way to dramatic grey/blue/dark red/brown limestone rockwalls filled with fossils and rainwater "plunge pools". the last night before we hiked up out the way we had come in, we camped in a large area where the main canyon widens, and spins off two side canyons, giving the apperance of a hub radiating canyon-spokes in all directions. in the center of the hub was a promontory/hill. we climbed it and sat around in a circle on top, talking about the day as we always did, as the sun set on the redrock, sending shadows inching out away from us through all the side canyons. Here's a daytime view looking down into the area where we were (the promontory is I think what's to the right of the "our campsite" arrow).

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Sunday, 26 October 2003 18:39 (twenty-two years ago)

nature is blowing my mind right about now.
my friend called me a few minutes ago and asked "is your house covered in soot and can you smell the smoke?"
i thought them insane until i opened the front door
i am one block from the ocean, but it doesn't help.
it seems that los angeles is on fire, or at least the green bits outside of it and the world smells like a giant bonfire.
shall i brave the soot and smoke for coffee?
the choice perplexes me. my newly washed hair will smell like a day at Burning Man if i venture forth but the coffee really really calls me-

― Orbit (Orbit), Sunday, 26 October 2003 19:07 (twenty-two years ago)

It sounds like fen blow.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 26 October 2003 19:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Orbit OTM -- further (if only slightly) inland like myself, it can be a bit oppressive. God knows what it's like on the other side of 5.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 26 October 2003 19:59 (twenty-two years ago)

While sea fishing in Wales one night we were fortunate enough to see a whole load of illuminous algae coming in and breaking on the shore.

― Fuzzy (Fuzzy), Sunday, 26 October 2003 20:10 (twenty-two years ago)

I saw N's purple sky thing too from my Mum's house, absolutely spectacular, especially as my Mum's room looks out over Chesterfield so you could see it kind of hanging over the town.

Other things:

going on a night dive and turning the torches off was pretty special, just the light from the plankton luminescing and the moonlight filtering through the water was amazing.

Also the milky way stretching across the sky in Western Australia with the odd shooting star zipping across

― Chris not Vicky (Vicky), Sunday, 26 October 2003 22:24 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm so glad you saw it too! The weird thing was the way the edges of the slabs of colour were straight - it was like someone had painted over parts of the sky with a roller.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 26 October 2003 22:39 (twenty-two years ago)

I can't remember what the explanation was, but it was completely localised wasn't it?

― Vicky (Vicky), Sunday, 26 October 2003 22:42 (twenty-two years ago)

I speedread that as 'but it was completely bollocks wasn't it?'.

― N. (nickdastoor), Sunday, 26 October 2003 22:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Being able to see the Leonid shower from inner urban Melbourne, on a mostly cloudy night, was a rare treat. I'd expected not to be able to see it, what with the light pollution. But somehow I woke up unaided at 3am, wandered out to the loungeroom, lay on the couch, and looked uup out the window. Nothing much was happening for ages and I was about to give up and go to bed when a large gap appeared in the cloud cover, and 2 or 3 huge meteors zipped past. These weren't normal shooting stars - they left luminescent green tails behind them and were quite large. I saw a couple more smaller ones, then the clouds came back over, so I lay there a while feeling very small and humbled then I went back to bed. Magic.

― Trayce (trayce), Monday, 27 October 2003 00:46 (twenty-two years ago)

one year passes...

This is such a pretty thread!

I've seen shooting stars a few times. Whenever I visit my Dad, who lives in a very rural area of Virginia, I'm amazed again at how beautiful all the stars are.

I like it when you can see the division between where it's raining and where it's not as the cloud passes through.

― Sarah McLusky (coco), Monday, 29 November 2004 19:35 (twenty-one years ago)

This is no way star related, but in terms of nature blowing my mind, as long as i shall live, i'll never forget being in a fishing boat in in Florida in 1988 and seeing a live, wild Manta Ray in the water whose wingspan dwarfed the boat.

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Monday, 29 November 2004 20:06 (twenty-one years ago)

seven months pass...

Glasgow skies regularly appeal to me.

― Alba (Alba), Monday, 18 July 2005 10:31 (twenty years ago)

I love this thread.

Once there was a daytime solar eclipse I'd somehow not heard about. I got to work, looked down at my feet and I had four shadows all in different directions. FREAKY.

― Trayce (trayce), Monday, 18 July 2005 11:20 (twenty years ago)

The transit of Venus was suitably awe inspiring. For a moment I could see why epople get religion.

Only for a moment, mind you.

― Stone Monkey (Stone Monkey), Monday, 18 July 2005 11:28 (twenty years ago)

one year passes...

OK, a news report about something similar-looking in Antarctica has taught me that these are called nacreous clouds, which has let me find lots of stuff on Google about when they happened in 1996. Didn't realise they were all over the country, not just Yorkshire.

Some quite good pictures of it from Manchester.

― Alba (Alba), Tuesday, 1 August 2006 18:25 (nineteen years ago)

RIGHT NOW in lightning and thunder and blowing rain storm. it's just like, all the elements that have to conspire to make such awesome flash weather violence happen have occurred, last for half an hour, possibly less/more, take away some of the crazy heat, and then roll off wherever weather goes when it's done impressing people.

― rrrobyn sharkattack battleforcenet (rrrobyn), Wednesday, 2 August 2006 00:12 (nineteen years ago)

five months pass...

Cold wind + Lake Geneva = blimey

― Alba (Alba), Sunday, 7 January 2007 14:10 (nineteen years ago)

I saw a rainbow the other night that the moon made! I have never seen one before. A few months ago, I saw huge rainbow with lightning playing around underneath it. It's great living by a huge open coastline.

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Sunday, 7 January 2007 17:17 (nineteen years ago)

Oh my god! That ice storm! I just sent that link to every visually-oriented person in my address book!

― Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Sunday, 7 January 2007 17:46 (nineteen years ago)

That is just stunningly beautiful.

― teh_kit (g-kit), Sunday, 7 January 2007 18:52 (nineteen years ago)

*boggles*

― ledge (ledge), Sunday, 7 January 2007 22:54 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.pbase.com/scherrer/january_2005_ice_storm

More photos

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Sunday, 7 January 2007 23:38 (nineteen years ago)

With Comic Sans captions! How appropriate for your whole world turning to ice!

― Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Monday, 8 January 2007 00:57 (nineteen years ago)

i remember in college walking out of a university computer lab at 4am, having put the finishing touches on a major paper for a biology seminar. the paper had been about the preponderance of organic compounds found in Martian rocks, potential for organic compounds to be whizzing around in meteors, Miller-Urey experiment and all that.

reaching the parking lot i was groggy, but was startled by a huge blob dripping out of the sky and burning out. first i thought i was hallucinating, maybe thought some kids had set off silent fireworks. then i realized i had just witnessed a meteor burn up in the upper atmosphere -- i had never seen a shooting star before, prior to that i had always assumed they came in on a straight line trajectory like in children's books.

suffice to say that having just spent several days writing about meteorite samples and then upon finishing actually witnessing a shooting star, the small hairs on the back of my neck were on fire.

― database update failed (sanskrit), Monday, 8 January 2007 04:11 (nineteen years ago)

I've seen northern lights kind've like the kind that ailsa described upthread. My friends and I were sitting watching it on top of this huge mysterious abandoned cement structure in a city park along the lakefront around 3am. Rather than being a flattish-looking sheet to the north like usual, it was more like rounded pulsating patterns that filled up the entire sky above us (I remember thinking at the time that it reminded me of what I imagined the giant evil brain at the end of A Wrinkle in Time looked like).

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Monday, 8 January 2007 06:24 (nineteen years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.