Iridescent Clouds

Yesterday I saw some really colorful Iridescent clouds, one of my favorite cloud phenomena. These clouds are visible when parts of clouds are thin and have similar size droplets, diffraction can make them shine with colours like a corona. I like how the Sun was covered enough to be visible through and not totally overexposed.

Nikon D850 with Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E
Exposure: 1/8000 sec. ISO 64 @ 112mm f/8

Rare colorful clouds

Yesterday, one hour before sunset, I did see some colorful clouds in the opposite direction of the Sun (At the Anti solar point). I never seen colored clouds there before so I had a hard time figuring out if they were polar stratospheric clouds or iridescent clouds. The colored clouds slowly faded away as the sun set so I thought it might be iridescent clouds, but I never seen them opposite of the Sun before.

When I returned home I contacted Les Cowley at OPOD (http://www.atoptics.co.uk) to get his opinion of these clouds and he guessed that it's tropospheric iridescent clouds. He's never seen them opposite the sun before so this is probably very rare.

Always exciting to see a new phenomena, perfect ending for 2017.

Happy new year everyone!

Noctilucent Clouds

Last night I got to see my first Noctilucent clouds up here in Jämtland for this season. These are clouds made of tiny ice crystals high up in the atmosphere that are lit up by the scattered sunlight late at night.

Sunset over Åreskutan

Photo number 4 in my 2014 recap.

Besides moonrises and moonsets I also did a lot of sunrises and sunsets. Here is a shot from April that shows an obscured Sun about to set behind Åreskutan, the biggest ski resort in Sweden.

The storm is coming

The coming days I will look back on 2014 and show you some of my favorite moments from this year.

We'll start of with this is photo from June. It was one of the most exciting weather fronts I ever seen and it swept in over Östersund with thunderstorms and heavy rain. This photo was taken just a few minutes before the rain started. You can see the rain pouring down in the background.

I really like the structures in the clouds, it almost looks like something out of a SciFi movie.

Noctilucent Clouds

On the 27th of July 2014 I saw some of the most beautiful Noctilucent Clouds I've ever seen. They emerged shortly after sunset and after a while they covered the entire sky. In this movie I've included an all sky time lapse that shows how these clouds changed over the course of two hours.



Music: Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Five

Supermoon in colorful clouds

The Supermoon from last night was hiding in some colorful clouds.

Low and High Rainbow

Here I have combined two shots from yesterday of two different rainbows. It's interesting to see how the Suns altitude in the sky affects the height of the rainbow.

The first photo was taken at 15:25 UTC (Add two hours for Swedish summer time) when the Sun had an altitude of 27° above the horizon. In the second shot, taken at 19:48 UTC, the Sun was just 0.033° (2 arc minutes) above the horizon. At sunrise or sunset a rainbow's centre is on the horizon as seen in the second image.

The hidden colors

Igår var det ganska kraftig dimma här i Östersund. Jag passade då på att ge mig ut med min kamera för att ta lite naturbilder. En sak som återigen slog mig var hur mycket svagare färgerna blir i vårt landskap när solen inte når fram på grund av moln eller dimma och alla föremål inte kan reflektera solljuset. Det har ni säkert också märkt att allt känns så mycket gråare och tristare sådana dagar.

För att experimentera lite med detta så tog jag en bild på ett väldigt grått motiv, stenar mot en grå himmel. Bilden till vänster är så som bilden kom ut ur kameran. När jag sedan kom hem försökte jag jobba fram så mycket färger som möjligt i datorn utan att tappa detaljer. Bilden till höger visar slutresultatet. Det är en överdriven bild vad gäller mättnad, så det skulle inte ha sett ut så även om solen var framme, men som ni ser, färgerna finns där, trots att vi inte ser dom.

Så nästa gång ni tycker att vardagen känns grå och tråkig, glöm då inte att det är bara en tråkig fasad, där under finns de vackra färgerna.

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Yesterday it was very foggy here in Östersund. I took the opportunity to go out with my camera to take some photos. One thing that once again struck me was how much weaker colors are in our landscape when objects can't reflect any sunlight due to fog or cloudy weather. I'm sure you also noticed that everything feels so much grayer and boring these days.


To experiment with this I took a picture of a very grey scene, stones against a grey sky. The image to the left is what came out of the camera. When I got home, I tried to work out as much color as possible with my computer without losing any detail. The picture to the right shows the final result. It is an exaggerated picture in terms of saturation, so it wouldn't have looked like that even if the sun was shining, but as you can see, the colors are there, even though we do not see them.

So next time you feel that a day is grey and dull, just remember that beneath that boring facade, there are beautiful colors.