By Tom Yulsman in Discover Magazine
Cottonwoods line a trail in Niwot,
CO. Photographed on 1/2/15. (Source: © Tom Yulsman)
Even excluding the iPhone in my
pocket, I carry a camera almost everywhere I go. And like many folks these
days, I enjoy sharing what I come up with on social media.
So on New Years day, I decided to
try posting a photo a day — and then I figured that I should tailor what I do
for ImaGeo, and post the results here. It’s a bit daunting —because life
happens and has a tendency to get in the way of creative endeavors. But I’m
going to give it a go.
The photo above is actually not my
first installment in this new Pic of the Day feature. I shot another image on
New Years day that I’ll share soon. And it’s not simply a photo. It’s actually
a mosaic of six images that I took with my iPhone (during a pause on a
run) and then stitched together with awesome Autostitch app. I then brought it into Adobe
Lightroom to tone down the vibrancy and saturation, which out of the camera
were a bit over the top.
What you see here is as close as I
could come to what it looked like to my eyes. And that almost psychedelic aqua
color along the horizon is what made me stop during my run and grab those six
images.
So, what about that blue and aqua
color?
The sky is blue because blue
wavelengths of light are scattered more than other wavelengths by molecules of
air in Earth’s atmosphere. And that aqua color along the horizon? As this
NASA explainer puts it:
The sunlight reaching us from low in
the sky has passed through even more air than the sunlight reaching us from
overhead. As the sunlight has passed through all this air, the air molecules
have scattered and rescattered the blue light many times in many directions.
Also, the surface of Earth has reflected and scattered the light. All this
scattering mixes the colors together again so we see more white and less blue.
Yeah, well that still doesn’t come
close to describing that aqua sky.
In any case, I’m posting this on
January 2nd. So I need to go back in time and post something for January 1st.
(Not to mention the 3rd.) I’ve got just the image. So please come back for
that.
Oh, one last thing: If you’re seeing
some geometric distortion in this image, you’re not hallucinating. This
photomosaic is representing a very broad and complex three dimensional space in
two dimensions. So weirdness is inevitable.
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