We had an excellent sky combo over Flagstaff last night. The full moon was blasting a halo into thin cirrus, and a lenticular cloud was blooming to the east of the Peaks. I started on Route 66 east of town a little after midnight to get some shots. The halo was really intense at that point.
180 degrees in the other direction, the lenticular cloud was looking nice and marshmallowy in the moonlight.
For a couple minutes I wondered if I should try shooting and stitching a massive panorama to capture the halo and lenticular together. I decided that would be really frustrating to compose decently and a lot of hard work later. So I moved on up Highway 89 between Sunset Crater and Wupatki. That managed to get both of them both features paired up with the Peaks.
The FGZ sounding from about 7 hours earlier shows a stable air mass with strong, unidirectional wind out of the west and a moist layer up at 350mb. The slight inversion on that sounding is a bit below the moist layer — not sure what that means, since it’s been above the moist layer in a couple previous cases.
