The Window Seat!

It was a week ago now that I transitioned back to "Ketelsen West". The move was just in time evidently as the high temperatures back east are in the teens and single digits, and Tucson is warm (80s) and sunny. But I enjoy both locations, so pretty much am home at either location.

As always, I enjoy the plane ride and always book the window seat - looking down sun, of course! Having the sun shine into the window you are sitting creates bad reflections and makes for lousy photos. Always shooting down sun is the way to go. So for the morning flight, I was on the right side of the plane, scoping out the northern direction from our flight path.

We had full overcast, but not the predicted freezing rain as we took off. It made for a boring start to the flight other than what was seen as soon as we cleared the cloud deck - a glory! Now these are not unusual - I've even blogged about them a couple times before. In this last link, I even demonstrated that you can infer the cloud droplet diameters by measuring the diameter of the first ring of the glory. You can also tell from the centering of the rings that I was sitting at the rear of the plane. Everyone who looks has their own - the pilot in the front sees one centered on the front tip of the plane.

The clouds hung around thru all of Illinois, and it magically cleared showing the Mississippi and the "Quad Cities".  Shown at right, is the River, with Davenport above it, Bettendorf to the right, Rock Island in the middle of the River and Moline below. Below Moline is the regional airport I've flown out of a few times when visiting family back in the 90s.

The little game I play is to see how far I can keep track of our flight path. Of course, rarely we fly over my house or family farms I've spend my early years tending. When/if I get disoriented, take a photo of a distinctive landmark you can find on Google Maps and re-set the internal clock - even when after the flight! For a little ways we paralleled the Mississippi until it turned more south, and shortly after that I spotted the confluence of what must be the Iowa and Cedar Rivers in SE Iowa. I also had my IR camera at the ready which much more readily shows the streams and wetland areas as pure black at a much higher contrast. Here the color shot is at left and the infrared version (beyond our range of vision to the red at right. I purposely used the wider view for the IR since with its additional property of haze-cutting, it also shows details at greater distance too. In the color shot, you can spot the towns of Columbus Junction to the left of the confluence, and Fredonia to the right. Just above the confluence is a huge Tyson Foods processing plant...


Crossing southern Iowa wasn't particularly exciting - no major metropolitan areas. There are a couple big reservoirs which served as waypoints as we crossed hundreds of miles of farm land. The next BIG appearance was the Missouri River. The Missouri has seen some major flooding in recent years and I've not kept up with its current status. In the visible image at left, the main channel seems full and perhaps some nearby farmland appears flooded. What I noticed in taking the photo is there was a loop-de-loop in the center, and a cursory search revealed it to be an "oxbow" lake, where the meandering of the river got cut off, forming the characteristic shape lake. This particular one is called Big Lake Recreation area, about 25 miles northwest of St Joseph, Missouri. If it can be believed, the area looks even more impressive in the IR as shown at right. With the plethora of darkness, there might be much more flooding down along the Missouri that I first realized...


Once into the northern Kansas area, all bets were off as far as keeping track of the flight path.  At least off the right side of the plane, there were no metropolitan areas - only the occasional reservoir allowed checking the flight path later.

There is another interesting optical phenomenon seen when looking down sun. When very high (we were at 32,000 feet), where the plane's shadow would normally be, you see a subtle bright spot instead! Called the Opposition Effect, it is an enhanced brightness as there is a small area without shadows, and possible brightening depending on what type of surface it is. I was waiting for this brightening to pass over a town or urban area, and it finally did - over Lacrosse, KS. Shown at left, the diffuse bright spot is tough to pick out, but what it does do is make all the street signs glow brightly! You can see many of the signs along the main drags brightly colored as the glass balls built into the signs to enhance brightness at night also work to reflect the light back to the observer during the day (me, in this case, the shadow being cast on the town)...

At the western edge of Kansas, dropping into Colorado and New Mexico, the clouds increased and there was nothing more to see. I missed the normal sight of Albuquerque, the VLA Telescope, and Mount Graham as we approached Tucson - all lost in the clouds. It didn't really clear till we crossed the Rincons on the east side of Tucson. Circling the town once, to land towards the southeast, we flew pretty much right over my house, so got a good view of the Rillito Racetrack - a horse racing venue during late winter about a mile north of my house. Also seen on the image to the left is the bike paths that trace both sides of the Rillito wash where I bike all the time.

Continuing to circle, we had a view to the west also, where a distant view of Kitt Peak (the flat-topped mountain in the far distance) was seen over the nearby Tucson Mountains.

Another journey complete, but I'll guarantee you that next trip I'll be watching out the window yet again!