A March Sunrise

It won’t be so easy to catch a sunrise from our front porch as the days get longer and the leaves fill the trees. The tree in the foreground is an oak and many of the others are that are silhouettes of bare branches now are maples. All of them will become effective drapes on the sunrise color.

I’ve just finished taking a Coursera course on Ancient Egypt and learned about Khepri – a god in the ancient Egyptian religion connected to the rising sun. It’s a word to add to my vocabulary describing that special light that is so great for photography in the early morning:

Khepri light.

February Mornings

I general have at least one snow post in February – but we have had no significant snow at all this winter (so far). We have had some wonderful early morning color. Here is what the sunrise looked like from my front door on February 10^th.

The color was transferred to the trees behind my house on Valentine’s Day. The color only lasts a very short period of time when it is reflected like this….I was pleased to catch it!

On the 17^th, I photographed the sunrise from the front door again. It was a little further along than on the 10^th since it was more orange than pink.

Finally – yesterday I looked out my office window and noticed a bird I had not seen since early fall – a robin in the morning sunlight that was making the tallest branches of the tulip poplar behind our house glow. Is it spring already?

Morning Sun

I like to photograph in morning light…particularly when I manage to capture the glow it creates on ordinary places. This is the view from my office window every sunny morning – the sun coming down the trees as it rises over the roof of the house. It puts a lot of color in the bare branches of winter trees!

Of course, there are the sunrise pictures. The edges of the clouds caught the blaze although the bulk of the clouds were thick enough still look very gray. The vegetation in front of our house was in silhouette with the light of the morning not quite bright enough yet. The tree in the foreground is an oak and some of the buds are large enough to be seen – even though it’s only January and a long time before it will leaf out.

January is a good month for this type of photography – the sunrise is still late enough to not require getting up early!

Wind Turbines in West Texas

Last Sunday, we left Abilene while it was still dark to drive to Tucson. I ask my daughter to take the first driving stretch because I wanted to photograph wind turbines at sunrise as we drove. The timing was good since we started seeing the big turbines almost immediately along Interstate 20 – and they continued for miles and miles. Most of them were set away from the highway but there were a few close enough to see the colorful sunrise light on the blades. The area must be one of the largest (if not the largest) in the US for wind power generation.

There were a lot of RV parks that looked full in the area and I wondered if RVs have become the housing of choice for temporary workers. There were people out and about – buddle up for the cold and working. Ranching, oil, wind….all industries big in the area that require outdoor work even when it is cold and a Sunday morning.

Surprisingly the wind did not bother the car as much in that stretch of highway as it did in the up and down area as we got further along – past Pecos. The terrain channels the wind into swirling gusts that we could feel in the car steering. We watched the big trucks more closely and minimized our time passing them….kept moving along at the speed limit – which is 80 mph for a lot of the drive through West Texas.

Grapevine, TX Sunrise

I traveled with my daughter to the AAS Conference in Grapevine, TX last week. We didn’t stay in the conference hotel (the Gaylord Texan) – opting for a less expensive hotel near the Grapevine Mall. The plan was that I would drop her off at the conference, visit with family in the area during the day, and pick her up when her sessions/dinner were done for the day. We planned to go down to hotel’s breakfast as soon as it opened each morning. The very first morning we came back to the room after breakfast to a spectacular sunrise as soon as we opened the drapes! These were taken from our hotel window.

The next day – we were a little later getting back to the room…and the sun was already up – muted by clouds. It was a lot more orange...still a nice sunrise.

A good breakfast and a beautiful sunrise. I like to start my day that way.

2017 Begins

I always like to get up early to see the sunrise on the first day of the year. This year will be no exception but I will see it somewhere along the road between Dickson, Tennessee and Dallas, Texas. I’m writing this post a few days ahead of time and scheduling it to come out on the 1^st - including a sunrise from a few days ago. Being on the road at the first of the year is as different as our trip to Conowingo was on Christmas morning.

When my daughter was young, we had a tradition of going down to the Smithsonian on the 1^st of the year. All the museums along the Mall in Washington DC were open. It wasn’t very crowded. I remember when my daughter was only 4 months old and I tried to get her to notice the elephant in the rotunda of the Natural History Museum! She doesn’t have a conscious memory of the experience, of course…but I’ve always wondered if she has a subconscious impression. When she was in elementary school, she spent a long time in the section of the Natural History Museum that displayed skeletons. She liked the Air and Space Museum but spent more time in the Natural History Museum.

So – something beautiful to start this New Year.