Another winter storm brought some snow but also morning fog to some of the low-lying areas. This type of shallow fog can produce fogbows as well as a Glory and Brocken spectre. I was not disappointed as all three were visible.
Time lapse (50x) of fog.
Another round of snow is expected this week.
A few days ago we had an impressive snow squall that formed downwind of the San Francisco Peaks. Watching this evolve on radar was fascinating and I decided to drive to a location where I would have a good view to the east.
Clouds in the west were blocking most sunlight but there was a narrow gap that allowed the sun to brightly illuminate the low clouds and fog associated with this event.
The radar image shows the precipitation from the snow squall while the large white dot is my location. The overall motion of the low cloud was to the south-southeast (left-to-right in the photograph)—however, the motion at the top of the low cloud was in the reverse direction (i.e., right-to-left) and there was some rotation along the cloudy/clear interface. This is fairly typical of a density current with cold air sliding under warmer air and shear/rotation being present at the interface.
Another fun day of cloud photography!
A few days after our big snowfall event I ventured out to Mormon Lake in search of interesting photographs. Upon arrival, I was treated to several hawks and ravens drifting on the wind directly over the Mormon Lake Overlook. Switching from the landscape settings to something more useful for capturing birds in flight (BIF) took a few minutes to get right.
I managed to catch one good image of this hawk up close and one image of a couple riding the updrafts. I also got few good images of a pair of ravens (or maybe crows???).
There were captured with a Nikon D750 and the Nikon AF-P 70-300mm zoom lens.
One the way home, we spotted these folks out on Upper Lake Mary doing some ice fishing and just hanging out on a fine day.
After several days of heavy snow in the higher elevations we got a break in the weather. I was specifically interested in photographing snow in Wupatki National Monument. The park had reported a few inches of snow so I had hopes that some of it was still around.
I arrived at Wukoki Pueblo a few minutes before sunrise. There had been snow all the way down—even at the Visitors Center—but dropping that last bit of elevation to the pueblo was enough to have erased the snow cover to just a few patches. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping to see but was still interesting.
Here are a few images taken just after sunrise.
I returned home via Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and captured this image of the cinder cone covered in new snow.
And now we have another snow storm approaching the area and January will end up with above normal snowfall amounts.
The planets Mars and Uranus will at their closest in the evening sky on 20 January 2021. Unfortunately, the Moon will also be very close to these two planets which could make it difficult to see Uranus. Mars, however, is bright enough to be easily viewed even with the Moon. Currently, Mars has a magnitude of 0.16 while Uranus is considerably dimmer at magnitude 5.76 — making Mars ~175 times brighter than Uranus.
I chose to shoot the two planets a few days early to avoid any issues with the Moon and clouds from an approaching winter storm. Besides, the appearance a few days either side of the date of conjunction would not look too much different.