Not so plain sky blog
Updates from Autumn
Well, I suppose this will be the first update as we finally have a couple of things worth writing about. First off, we had a ‘fun’ morning last Saturday and observed a number of different things. In the days leading up to Saturday we had received nearly 3 inches of rain, and with clear skies, light winds, and low temps fog seemed like a sure bet. We headed to a couple areas that normally report fog and couldn’t find anything, so Tyler and I decided to head down to Platte River State Park and at least shoot some star trails or look for some late Orionids. Skies were clear and we counted 18 meteors in about an hour and a half, even managed to catch one as I was shooting star trails. Then we decided to head up to the observation tower for sunrise over the river. The sunrise seemed to take forever, and as we were waiting we took note of the fall colors and river steam, as well as some small ponds beginning to steam in the cold fall air. Eventually as the sun crested, we had a distorted sunrise and the ponds began to steam like mad! After shooting a few sunrise images we decided to find somewhere to try for steam devils as Mike Hollingshead as seen on a couple of occasions. First we tried a pond in the park, then the river front, we did find a couple ponds that were now steaming like mad, but unfortunately we didn’t have ways to get to many of them. On the way home I caught a bright fog bow over some corn near Springfield. Not the most amazing morning ever but it was good to get out and break of the monotony of these drizzly fall days we’ve been having. You can see photos at both of the gallery links on the ‘Galleries’ page.
Now the focus turns towards any possible snow storm chances as well as a few trips to the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Northwest Missouri. The first major blizzard stuck this weekend in the Rockies and dumped as much as 3 feet on some of the more mountainous areas in and around Denver. Were hoping to get out and chase a blizzard or ice storm as the opportunity presents itself, but thus far its been more watching and waiting then anything. Squaw Creek looks like it may be a possibility this weekend (Sunday) with the bird counts starting to increase and snow blanketing a lot of Western Nebraska and South Dakota. There won’t be another count before this weekend but we are hoping there will be quite a few birds there, as the last count on Monday showed close to 90,000 ducks. We will keep you updated on this and are planning a few trips down there throughout the winter, after all every day brings us close to Spring 2010!
posted at 10:08 p.m. November 1, 2009 by Chris Allington
Welcome our weather blog
Here we will post forecasts for chases, photo updates, future plans, etc. We'll post the author of the blog at the bottom, so you know if it's me or Chris. Could be any forecast from fog, to winter storms, or Severe weather setups. This is the place to Check for new updates!
posted at 7:21 p.m. September 24, 2009 by Tyler Burg
Interesting morning
I shouldn't have gone up to Murray hill, it was a bust of course, but the shots that paid off today were just 3 miles from my house! I went to a lake near my house after I woke up at 5am and saw fog outside. I thought if I could get my headlights above the lake a little looking onto the lake I could get a full bow. I tried it at the boat launch and man was it cool! you go to the end of the dock and its just a huge hoop. It looked crazy blowing around all over the lake. Here is a shot of a lot of the halo, it's hard to fit the whole thing in the frame, even at 10mm. I think I was talking to Mike or Chris on the phone in this shot, thats why my arms might look a little weird.
 
After talking to Mike I decided to go up to Murray hill (Bad Choice!) and end up getting there maybe 30 minutes before sunrise, I actually tried a hill south of there at first to see if the fog was lower, this spot was very boring though, nothing up open fields to shoot, Murray hill at least has some interesting things in the foreground, like the curvy roads, the town itself, grain elevators, etc... I decide to book it to back to where Chris and Mike were, only I didn't know that I had no need to be in a hurry. It sucked up there, we didn't even see the sun until 40 minutes after sunset and it never let up. We were in the fog the whole time.
So eventually we give up go down and they begin to drive away, and I try to start my car... Of course! I left my lights on and my battery is dead. I called Chris and he came back and we tried to find jumper cables at a gas station, little sioux, nope. Sorry but I'm not going to go knocking door to door for those, its kind of a creepy town. We drive to pisgah and look up the phone number for the gas station, call it, nope. But they give us the number to the tire shop in town and they have some. We go there and he lets us use this jumper box, but we can't get it to work for some reason and then get owned as he starts it up in 10 seconds. He was pretty pissed he had to drive all the way there lol. Too bad I didn't have cash, or I would have given him a tip for helping us out.
Time to stop going out for fog and start saving gas money for squaw creek this winter, and the 2010 chase season. Might do a little mini trip for fall foliage here in a couple weeks.
posted at 11:21 a.m. September 23, 2009 by Tyler Burg
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