One-Year Ago (28-July-2013) — Iceland

Gone to See Iceland 2013 Photography Safari with Mike Hagen. Day -1: Reykjavik.

Vitrified Body Parts Caged on the Streets of Reykjavik, Iceland. Image taken with a Nikon 1 V2 camera and 6.7-13 mm VR lens (ISO 200, 13 mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec).

Reykjavik Walkabout. Street Photography. Image taken with a Nikon 1 V2 camera. (David J Mathre)
Reykjavik Walkabout. Street Photography. Image taken with a Nikon 1 V2 camera. (David J Mathre)

Monday (10-June-2013) — At Sea

Gone to See Europe. Semester at Sea Spring 2013 Enrichment Voyage on the MV Explorer. Day 45: At Sea between Stockholm and Copenhagen.

Late night or early in the morning (hard to tell this far north when there isn’t much darkness at night) I looked out my cabin window on the MV Explorer and saw the electric blue Noctilucent clouds. I read about them before (http://www.spaceweather.com/), but had never seen them.  The clouds are ice crystals that are very high that you can only see for a short time when the sun is below the horizon. One theory is the crystals are nucleated when micro-meteors pass through the upper atmosphere. We were in the Baltic Sea traveling from Stockholm to Copenhagen and the sun doesn’t set until very late I set up a camera in my cabin and took a set of 99 images that I made into this time-lapsed video (Nikon D4 camera, 28 mm f/1.8 lens (ISO 200, 28 mm, f/1.8, 1 sec)).