Came back this morning at 8.30 AM from a job… Gent was silent and the sun was rising to be the master of the day. Shanti spent the night in the car and I decided to give him a nice walk from his hard night in a Dutch parking garage. It wasn’t a lot of a nice walk for him… the reflections in the water got my attention… I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep that made me look more careful into the water but they were beautiful for sure. A small selection…

[Show as slideshow]

Share on Facebook

from the last 2 months… There’s a little bit of everything…optics, cloudscapes and a nice tour bus sunset… next weather update in a week with, I hope, a massive amount of snow in Belgium… lol

[Show as slideshow]

12►

Share on Facebook

When sunlight meets oriented plate crystals, the same crystals that form sundogs a circumzenithal arc is formed. The refraction of rays nearly parallel rays through faces inclined at 90° produces very pure and well separated prismatic colours. The colours of the circumzenithal arc are purer than those of the rainbow.

[Show as slideshow]

Share on Facebook

in Geneva. Went out yesterday for a bike ride in Geneva. Not that there is a lot to see but as soon as I found out that the harbour of Geneva contains a very high fountain, I thought… ah… sunny weather and fountain equals optics. Yeps… it does…

The Jet d’Eau, or water-jet, is a large fountain in Geneva, Switzerland, and is one of the city’s most famous landmarks, being featured on the city’s official tourism web site and on the official logo for Geneva’s hosting of the 2008 UEFA Championships.  It is also one of the largest fountains in the world.  Situated at the point where Lake Geneva empties into the Rhone River, it is visible throughout the city and from the air, even when flying over Geneva at an altitude of 10 km (33,000 ft).

Five-hundred litres (132 gallons) of water per second are jetted to an altitude of 140 metres (459 feet) by two 500 kW pumps, operating at 2,400 V, consuming over one megawatt of electricity.  The water leaves the nozzle at a speed of 200 km/h (124 mph). When it is in operation, at any given moment there are about 7,000 litres (1849 gallons) of water in the air. Unsuspecting visitors to the fountain—which can be reached via a stone jetty from the left bank of the Lake—may be surprised to find themselves drenched after a slight change in wind direction.

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch. A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; the discrete bands are an artefact of human colour vision. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton’s sevenfold red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet . Rainbows can be caused by other forms of water than rain, including mist, spray, and dew.

[Show as slideshow]

Share on Facebook

Ostankino Tower (Russian: Останкинская телебашня, Ostankinskaya telebashnya) is a free-standing television and radio tower in Moscow, Russia. Standing 540 metres (1772 ft) tall, Ostankino was designed by Nikolai Nikitin. It is a member of the World Federation of Great Towers. The tower was the first free-standing structure to exceed 500 m (1640 ft) in height. The tower was constructed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. It is named after the Ostankino district of Moscow in which it is located.

Construction began in 1963 and was completed in 1967. It surpassed the Empire State Building to become the tallest free-standing structure in the world. It held this record for nine years until the CN Tower was completed in Toronto, Canada in 1976, which surpassed its height by 13 metres (43 ft). The Ostankino Tower remained the second-tallest freestanding structure in the world for another 31 years until the Burj Dubai surpassed both it and the CN Tower in height in 2007.

The tower created a desire for other large cities in the Soviet dominated countries to build high towers. Towers taller that 300 metres were built in Kiev, Tashkent, Almaty, Riga, Berlin, Vilnius, Tallinn, Jerevan, St Petersburg and Baku. No one is taller than the Ostankino Tower however.

The Ostankino Tower has remained the tallest free-standing structure in Europe for 42 years. The Russia Tower, a proposed 612-metre (2,010 ft) mixed-use skyscraper planned for the Moscow International Business Centre, was originally expected to exceed the Ostankino Tower’s height when completed. However, the project has been suspended due to financial difficulties and it remains unclear if construction will resume.

A 1994 plan to increase the tower’s height to 561 meters by adding an antenna was not implemented for lack of funding.

Noctilucent clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the “ragged-edge” of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. The name means roughly night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator.

They are the highest clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometers (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth’s shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no evidence that they were observed before 1885.

[Show as slideshow]

12►

Share on Facebook