Recently in Optics Category

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.

A Facebook discussion got fired up recently about primary colors: which ones are correct?

It’s funny how riled things get on this one. The source of the confusion that I've seen boils down to what kind of primary are we talking about? Additive? Subtractive? How about ‘pshychological’ (artist’s) primaries? Maybe even squeak in the opponent primaries of the LAB color space.

Additive Primaries: Red, Green, Blue
This is what’s happening on the screen of your computer or phone right now as it emits light into your eyes.

Subtractive Primaries: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow
What’s happening on that full color piece of junk mail sitting on your desk as it reflects ambient light at you. Black is usually added in print to compensate for impurities/imperfections in the three primary pigments.

Psychological Primaries: Blue, Red, Yellow
I used to think of this as artist's primaries, but apparently it's also called "psychological". This is a painters approximation of subtractive primaries—artists may start here for color mixing, but the gamut is very limited so other colors have to be added to support it.

Opponent Primaries: Magenta-Green, Yellow-Blue, Luminosity/White-Black.This is a conceptual color space based on theories of how the eye responds to opposing/overlapping colors across the red, green and blue cones. The fact that it separates luminosity from pure color creates some useful image processing techniques in the LAB color space. (L=Luminosity, A=green-magenta opponents, B=blue-yellow opponents)

These primaries aren’t determined by actual physical properties of light, but by the fact that most human eyes are trichromats and have three types of cones with peak sensitivities to red, green and blue light. So our technology and artistry have been geared to interpret and feed us light in those terms. I think it's really, really cool.

Which means, if tetrachromat Zebra Fish decided to get in on the act, they’d probably want _four_ primaries that add ultraviolet to the mix…so they could get the most visual appeal out of their soggy coffee-table books.

Special note—while I think this is extremely cool, it can also be extremely frustrating for color blind individuals who might have lower—or no—sensitivity in some of those cones!

This wikipedia article does an outstanding job detailing some of this: Primary Color

After about 17 inches of snow yesterday, Flagstaff went under a blizzard warning last night. Apparently the first one in about ten years. It blew pretty hard for much of the night, and I could hear things falling over in the carport. Between 11 pm and midnight, power flashes lit up our windows, followed by a darkening of the sky until power was re-routed. That happened three times with the last outage being the longest. We wondered how cold it would get in the house if it lasted all night. We've got four bodies and lots of blankets, so it wouldn't be unmanageable--just uncomfortable.

By morning, the snow was done, and the wind had died down. All snow covered surfaces were encrusted in an inch-thick layer of snow-ice. Shoveling the walk and driveway required chopping it into squares like a frosted dessert. My back, shoulders and arms have been complaining all day and will probably be a real mess tonight.

The morning after a big snow is always beautiful. As I worked on the mortared snow, I was treated to an amazing sunrise. All the remaining snow crystals drifting through the air allowed a sun pillar to form.

Some of the roads along the way to work were still suffering from blowing snow obscuring things.

The interstate was a dream to drive. I only saw 2 other cars on the way to work. It sounds like ADOT had closed access to I-40 from Kingman to Holbrook, so the only traffic was local, and that's me!