2023 – Weather or not………
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on September 20, 2023)
September 15 through September 19 was an interesting extended weekend of photographic weather.
I know you heard all the noise about Hurricane/Tropical Storm Lee’s potential northward path from the Caribbean: Will it slam the East Coast? Will it get pushed around by a cold front and maybe hit a whale in the mid-Atlantic?
Turns out that the breezy (and dry) outermost bands barely brushed our area, but it’s the first time (for me and my camera) that this was extremely visible.
September 15 was a beautiful, absolutely cloudless-sky day until Lee popped by at around 9am. I noticed it when I happened to look out my one south-facing window and saw this (click to enlarge):
This is exactly why the iPhone has a PANOramic setting: You can see Manhattan on the far left horizon. You can see a large swath of Hackensack seemingly adjoining Manhattan, from the blue-and-yellow construction site with the huge crane to the Middle School right in the – where else? – middle, to the gorgeous steeple of the First Presbyterian Church of Hackensack, to the Hackensack University Medical Center – (OK, “Hackensack Hospital”), which adjoins some of the swanky hi-rises on the right horizon, where people pay triple the rent I pay just to look at my old building (while I pay a third of that to look at theirs).
The point is that I’ve never seen such a clear delineation between hurricane bands and cloudless skies…………and I didn’t have to travel anywhere to shoot it.
I took a tighter shot of part of that scene with my little Canon and combined it with satellite imagery to show exactly what was going on (although the satellite shot was taken later in the day when the bands reached as far west as the center of North Jersey):
A few hours later, I went for a stroll on the Hackensack River Walkway and noticed the curvature of the now-overhead bands:
All the fun without a single drop of rain…………
We DID get some rain on Monday, but even that brought more photo fun from home when it stopped.
Though it’s a bit weak, this may be the largest FULL rainbow I’ve ever shot from my living room (click to enlarge):
I shot this looking east at 6:46pm. I couldn’t see the whole rainbow when standing inside near the window, so I opened it and stuck my arm out almost as far as I could and shot a wide panoramic (almost north to south) with my phone 7 or 8 times.
This shot was actually almost twice as wide – it included the Middle School – but I had to crop them all because of too much non-linear arm movement on both ends. Besides, I really only wanted the rainbow – which wasn’t very bright – but was now centered.
The clouds on the horizon must be the cold front moving through. I’ve never seen one that was that clear before AND seemed to be connecting both ends of the rainbow.
Six or seven minutes later, I tried to get good shots of each end of the rainbow. I like the Sears one better (cloud color is WAY better that the other one), but that other one has something else going on. The Modern 1 and 2 (Fort Lee twin towers near the GWB) are reflecting the setting sun, but 2 is directly in line with the sun and REALLY reflecting it:
Five minutes later, here’s all that’s left of the right side of the rainbow. I don’t recall ever seeing a strong-colored piece of a rainbow “suspended” in the air like this:
Now that all the action to the east is finished with, it’s time to look west, where the sun has just set, but is still illuminating clouds:
At that moment, I noticed it was drizzling and that the colors shown in the above picture were reflected in the roof puddle:
This was a fun weather weekend to shoot from home. I’m amazed that after living here for more than 35 years, I’m STILL finding interesting things to photograph EVERY DAY without going anywhere to do it!
Good thing my rent isn’t calculated on a per-photo basis.
Great pictures, Bob. Thanks.