July has been way too fucking hot, and while I would like to believe that the change in arbitrary labeling that we engage in will somehow make a difference in the climate, I’m a bit skeptical, especially since August has never been known as a cooler month. Yet here we are at the month-end anyway, which does at least mean we have the abstract to consider, and I’m going to do something a little different this time, since it leads into further frames that are not as abstract but still should be featured (from my own definition of “should,” anyway.) And so, we begin with this:
I’d let this one stand without exposition if I thought it was a little more mysterious, but I suspect it’s easy enough to tell that it’s clouds illuminated by a hidden sun. In this case, the outing this weekend was ostensibly to catch sunrise, but the sun rose hidden by a thick layer of clouds, and eventually peeked out long after official sunrise, announcing its imminent arrival in this manner. Yet even with all this, when it did appear, there was little color to be had from it.
Just yellow. Ho hum.
A little later on though, it was passing in and out of obscuring clouds, and in one such instance, I snagged a few frames as it was semi-obscured and filtered down to manageable levels. These revealed something interesting.
The only filter here is/are the clouds, which don’t seem that thick but dropped the sunlight down enough to focus on it with the 600mm lens without being blinded. And they also showed what appeared to be several sunspots, which I didn’t notice until I was back home and unloading the memory card. Intrigued by this, I dug out the solar film again since the sun was now high and direct, and did a few frames with the help of that. I will note here that this is so effective that finding the sun through the viewfinder can actually be tricky; no glare announces when you’re getting close to the mark, and trying to spot the sun directly so you can tell which way to aim only induces temporary blindness. So with one eye tightly closed and the other pressed to the viewfinder, you have to wave the camera back and forth in the general direction until the solar disc suddenly appears in the frame. But it worked as intended, and confirmed that there were indeed sunspots.
This, by the way, was underexposed by about a full stop, which lets the details show much better, but yeah, plenty of little spots to be found there. I’ll have to keep checking periodically, because now that I have the solar film, I have the chance to catch some really good sunspots if they appear, and we’re almost at the 12-year solar maximum. We’ll see what happens.