POTD: Flying Buttress

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Flying Buttress
Death Valley National Park, California
2024

A very unusual arch or widow. (It’s not always clear to me how the two differ.) It looks like it was from two pillars that leaned towards each other and then fell over at the same time, forming the arch in the process. But that would take a rather remarkable feat of geological timing, so I suppose it’s more likely it was formed as a unified arch first and then started to fall apart due to further weathering of the fissured rock.  On the other hand though, it’s quite a remarkable feat of geological structuring and weather just to get an arch to form in the first place, so who knows.

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POTD: Walking on the Moon

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Walking on the Moon
Death Valley National Park, California
2024

This photo, especially the high contrast foreground reminds me of photographs of the stark lunar surface taken back in NASA’s Apollo Program days. Of course the Fashion Queen needs to be decked out in a space suit to make the illusion really work.

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POTD: 22 Degrees

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22 Degrees
Death Valley National Park, California
2024

I checked with Wikipedia to see what the “official” name of this phenomenon is and was surprised to find out that it is called a 22° halo, so named because they usually have “an apparent radius of approximately 22° around the Sun or Moon.” That seemed really strange to me because I don’t think I’ve ever seen radii expressed in terms of degrees before, and at first I couldn’t figure out what angle they were talking about. Never fear though, Wikipedia goes on to give a detailed explanation including an easily understood application of Snell’s law:

θ deviation = θ incidence + sin − 1 ⁡ [ n sin ⁡ ( π 3 − sin − 1 ⁡ sin ⁡ θ incidence n ) ] − π 3 .

Hah, just kidding, I don’t understand it either. To add insult to injury the Wikipedia article then goes on to explain how to “intuitively” understand what all the calculations mean. All I was able to glean from that further explanation was that the author (most likely a physicist of some ilk) doesn’t really understand what intuitive means.

But one small illustration in the article did confirm that my own “intuitive” idea of the what the angle in question is. Imagine a stick pointing from your eye to the sun (don’t use a real stick for obvious reasons). Then imagine a second stick pointing from your eye to the halo ring. Grab that protractor (plastic, or metal if you’re really old) you’ve been saving since your school days and measure that angle and it should come out to be about 22°. The proof, as they often say in the math world, is left to the reader, or Wikipedia.

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