Somebody Painted the Sky

Rainbows are amazing. They even brighten up a drab Paddington skyline. And the physics behind them is wonderful as well.  And just think that the splitting of light into those various colours might at this very moment be helping you read this. See DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) You will either be interested or at least it might help your insomnia. But it is very important to all us Internauts. Copyright Paul Andrews and Caroline Schmutz, Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

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The Trails of our Destruction? The Question of Contrails

I took this photo the day after I had taken a short European flight. A beautiful early morning sky with most of the clouds being made up of contrails from flights having recently crossed overhead. Apparently, there could be up to 13,000 planes in the sky at any one time and 500,000 people. There is some controversial studies on the impact of these man made clouds on climate change. It is difficult for us to comprehend how anything that we do might might affect the planet that we live on. The planet for most people is so big and so solid that they have difficulty understanding human impact especially since our individual lives are so short. But do we really understand eccentricity, axial tilt and axial precession? Probably not. Do we know why the last series of ice ages started 2.5 million years or so ago? We can trace Homo Sapiens back about 200,000 years so we came about during an ice age but everything that we see and use has come about since the end of the last ice age and the start of the interglacial that we now live in that started about 12,000 years ago. In that time the estimated 5 million of us started farming and the industrial revolution so that within the relatively, in biological terms, short time frame we had become 1 billion people by around 1800. Just 200 years later we are well past 7 billion and rising fast and have invented cars, planes and smart phones but are we so smart? The bit of the sky that we live in is around 15Km thick, the channel that separates England and France is wider than that and you probably drive or travel further that that to go to work. And we expect this thin layer to absorb everything that we throw at it. Many people accumulate wealth and are so concerned with ensuring their offspring are financially secure but we all share the same small sky and these people don’t appear to realise that you can’t buy a clean piece of it no matter how many pounds, yen or dollars that you have. Save the planet, why, it isn’t necessary? We in all probability could make Earth uninhabitable for ourselves and could take many more species with us as we carry on with our own demise. Life will carry on with or without us and won’t even notice our passing as it re-configures the planet for yet another time. Copyright Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk

Infinity and Beyond – Heading South from Formosa in Argentina

I was just looking at the next photograph to put on our Flickr site, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/, and I came across this one. Is it any wonder why some of us in the past thought that the Earth was flat given what we see in this picture? Given that the only mode of transport on land until fairly recently in our history would have been on foot or by horse the world would have looked very flat to many. Good thing we have the international space station, satellites and we have been to the moon to prove otherwise. You can see and buy any of our work on our website, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk .

The serenity of Lake Titicaca – Mirrored clouds Peru

Lake Titicaca is one of the many amazing places on this planet and at 3800 metres is generally regarded as the highest navigable lake. We were there, unfortunately many years ago, and we were lucky to have this wonderful day with the blue sky, the blue water and the white clouds. It was very warm to start with when we took our tour of the lake from Puno but at that height the temperature quickly fell as the sun became lower in the sky. We were fortunate unlike many others who had warmer clothing with us as it was an open boat. A fantastic experience if you manage to get there. We actually sell this photo as a card and in various other formats from our website, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk.

Brief existence – Bubble in the sky above Lausanne, Switzerland

A wonderful summer’s day in the beautiful city of Lausanne in Switzerland. It was a Saturday morning, August the 9th 2014 and there was a man in the square called Place de la Palud blowing bubbles for the children.  For this bubble lived for a few brief moments as it ascended in the heat of that August day. In terms of complexity was it any more complex as a bubble than as a collection of soap molecules. Something to ponder. This photograph is available from us at www.junagarhmedia.co.uk.