Whoah, got a day behind again. What a bummer! I don’t know what happened to the clock yesterday. It kept moving in big, sporadic jumps. I had intended to tell you about Saturday evening at Kranket Island  where we had a party for Jo Noble’s birthday, but now I’ve already forgotten most of it.

The part that I do remember is the stunning sunset effects which we saw in the Eastern  sky. Yes, that’s right, you are looking East in this shot, just as the sun is nearing the horizon in the West:

I know that there is a proper name for this effect, but I can’t remember it right now. It’s 05:00 and I’m not going to trudge through Google to find it. I’ll count on a knowledgeable reader to leave a comment. The effect lasted less than five minutes.

The curve that you see in the ray on the right is an effect of the way which I took the panorama shots. The image is made up of about seven frames. Of course, the boat was sloshing around a lot, so it was difficult to hold the camera perfectly straight. The image covers about 150°

Here is a single frame image of the centre of the scene:

The main ray on the right side shoots up (or down, rather) past the huge cumulonimbus incus cloud on the horizon, which is still catching the last rays of the sun, reddened by their passage through the dusty lower atmosphere. I think that these rays are shadows of clouds near the horizon in the West. They appear to converge on the Eastern horizon at a point opposite the sun because they are passing through the atmosphere at a low angle and are visible for a long distance. Think of a pair of straight railroad tracks stretching off to the horizon. They seem to meet at a point in the far distance.

Okay, if that isn’t geeky enough for you how about the pileus cloud cap on the top of this towering cumulus cloud:

The pileus is the fuzzy little hat sitting on top of the cloud. It is formed when the cloud is rising very rapidly, pushing warmer, wetter air up into cooler areas. The moisture condenses out into a little lens-shaped cap which folds over the top of the main cloud.

Okay, enough meteorology. Since we’re doing reddish stuff, have a look at this Spotfin Lionfish (Pterois antennata):

The image is actually upside-down. I found him under a ledge and could barely see him. I had to stand on my head and shoot to get the image. This fills your sinuses full of salt water pretty quickly. It usually produces a few good sneezes when you get right-side-up again. Sneezing into a regulator underwater is an amusing experience.

I’ll throw in one more reddish thing before moving on. This lumbering, spiky critter is a kind of Sea Cucumber, specifically (Thelenota rubralineata):

The rubralineata  is one of the more colourful Sea Slugs. I have another picture of one here.

Well, that’s it for yesterday’s post. I have to hurry on to today’s post or I’ll miss the sunrise.

I’ll start today with a couple of images that I got a few nights ago when I was trying to capture lightning in a thunderstorm. Here is an amusing image of a boat tied up at the south side of the compound near the airport. You can see the lights of the airport glowing in the distance and off of the bottoms of the nearby low clouds. The lighting on the boat and the fence and trees is from the main wharf which is at least a half-kilometre away:

The shot took fifteen seconds to expose. You can see a bit of motion blur on the boat, as it was bobbing around in the gentle waves.

This is the only shot of the thunderstorm that showed any lightning. My Canon G9 only allows up to fifteen second exposures. I wish I could get a full minute out of it. There wasn’t enough lightning in this cloud to make more than one or two flashes in fifteen seconds. This was the best shot that I got. I’m going to try again soon:

Strangely, this year has been almost absent of thunderstorms.

Here is a shot of Coconut point in the morning sun. I got this one on the drive into town a couple of days ago:

It’s not a bad sunrise shot, but not as spectacular as some. What is interesting is that I accidentally caught a mob of Flying Foxes returning to town after there night-time raid on the gardens. You might have to click to enlarge to see them.

I got some nice images last Sunday on the way back from Blueblood on Mike Cassell’s boat, Felmara.  Here is a shot into the lowering sun with the Canon G9 set with the Night Snapshot scene setting and the flash forced on: I really enjoy having specific settings on the camera in the form of Scenes. It takes care of most of the adjustments that you need for particular shooting conditions. I could have recreated this shot using manual settings, but I would have to think a lot more. With the G9 I simply had to set the camera on Scenes, choose the Night Snapshot by spinning the wheel until it appeared on the screen, push the flash control until I could see that it was on demand and fire away.

This strange apparition is a lenticular cap on a Cumulonimbus cloud:

The cloud (called a pileus [Latin for cap] – thanks, Steve Goodheart) is rising up so quickly into the upper atmosphere that it is pushing warmer, moister air above it in a sort of shock wave. The warm, moist air can’t get out of the way, so it gets moved up to colder regions and the water in the air condenses into a small lens-shaped cloud that sits on top of the thunderstorm. There was much more of a rainbow effect visible to the naked eye. I couldn’t capture those nuances with the camera.

Though a US$4,000 camera and lens could do a much better job on this very technically demanding shot, for US$400, I’m quite happy with what my Canon G9 gave me:

The problem here is what is called dynamic range. I don’t know what the real numbers are, but I’d guess that there is at least 100,000 times as much light in the sun glowing through the thin cloud layer than there is in the trees in the foreground. The little sensors in point and shoot camera simply cannot handle this difference. So, everything gets compressed into a smaller range.

However, the technical aspects of this shot are not what I’m thinking of now. What I am thinking of is the gift that I got when the opportunity arose. There was a good deal of luck involved. Felmara  was moving at a rapid pace. I was shooting a medium telephoto shot from a bouncing boat. I had maybe a one-tenth of a second window for the shot.

Luck was with me.

The sky was very serene this morning when I took Eunie to the airport for her tedious journey to North America. She’s going to be gone until mid-June. Iwasn’t going to go this time, but I couldn’t face two and a half months by myself. So, I got a cheap round-trip fare from Brisbane to New York City (about a thousand Aussie Dollars) and decided to stay another month in Madang and then fly to be with Eunie and my son and his family in Hamilton, Ontario for six weeks. I’ve posted before about my adventures in Ontario – here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I’ll be flying back home to Madang with her.

I’ll be posting every day that it’s possible, since I’ve gotten in the habit and you’re still reading (320 visitors yesterday – a record for Madang – Ples Bilong Mi – about 8,000 page views in the last month). So, in about a month, get ready for another long period of “On the Road” posts. I’ll be bringing you images, information, and my usualy cock-eyed opinions covering a variety of esoteric subjects.

Here is what it looked like when I got into town. This shot was taken at the vacant lot where the old Burns Philp wholesale warehouse was. It burned down a long time ago:

The land in the distance is Kranket Island. Here is a telephoto shot of the big fiery Cumulonimbus cloud:

On Modilon Road, near the Jomba Police Station, there are some trees that the Flying Foxes favour. They were all stirred up this morning, flying around, screeching, and dropping fruity bombs everywhere. You don’t want to get hit by a Flying Fox Fruit Cocktail:

All has been well with our Flying Foxes lately. There was a big scare a few months ago when they all left town for a few weeks. Then they came back and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Unusual natural events cause quite a stir. For some reason, people were very afraid of a tsunami when the Flying Foxes left.

Go figure. On the other hand, maybe it does make some kind of sense.

Yes, I’m still out on Miss Rankin diving rarely explored waters. I’m a regular Jock Koostow. (Yes, I know I misspelled it. It is from humility that I do so.)

If I live through this, I’ll be back on the 18th.

In the meantime, I’ll attempt to entertain you with a (nearly) all-around sunset.

Leaving Tab Anchorage one evening for a night dive, we encountered a fairly common sight here – sunset wherever you look.

Here’s the view to the West where you’d expect the magic:

Here’s the view to the South, where colours like this are not so common at sunset:

And here’s the view to the EAST, where you’d not expect to see much at all:

I think that the big anvil-top (Cumulonimbus incus) thunderstorm in the West was causing the barred pattern in the East. Don’t ask me how light bends that way.

I don’t know why I didn’t take a shot to the North. Maybe nothing was going on there.