Yup, More Dust!!

No, not from tonight. But, nearly a year ago.

I knew that I was going to have to do this. If you have been following any of my Picasa web albums, and especially the newest ones, you have surely noticed that I am nearly a year behind in uploading my photos. And, it's not that I haven't been taking more pictures. In fact, far from that. It's just that life is busy, and I do spent most of my free time taking these pictures and getting them organized on my computer. I try nearly every day to upload a few more shots to Picasaweb, but the more I try, the behinder I get.

So, after last nights foray into the dust, I looked at this evening's sky, and decided not to go out for pictures. Instead, I decided that I'd stay home and upload a few more shots to my web albums. I've been uploading my pictures chronologically, and I'm now just about done with May of 2008. Whew!

Well, anyway, the shots that were next in order for uploading were from May 21. Wouldn't you know it -- it was a dusty night, too. Here are a few shots from that night.

For the first three shots below, I'm probably still five miles away from home. But, as I was driving, I noticed that the sun was playing hide-and-seek behind the coulds. I love it when it does this. So, I pulled over and took some shots. You can see that the sky looks blue up higher, and that lower down, there is indeed a layer of dust blowing along. The mountains at the horizon are nearly obscurred.



This next shot shows the dust even better, and if you look closely, you can tell that the sun's rays are not only shining around the cloud, but also through it.



In this next shot, I found the cloud interresting enough that I zoomed in to better see the details of the sun's rays through the cloud. I don't take very many shots like this (without being able to see the ground), but sometimes the clouds are just good enough to merit it. And, I have a lot of other shots to go with this one, that DO show the ground - like the one above.



By the time I got home, I hustled out to get a few more shots. Like last night's shots, the sun is more or less just a bright fuzzy ball, and does not have sharp edges.



That is, until it goes down far enough. And, then it again has sharp edges. Also, notice in this last shot, that the sun is beginning to go down behind a dense cloud bank that you couldn't even tell was there until the sun started to disappear behind it. This happes, actually, quite often.



And, in case you are wondering, yes, I really do remember most of these photo shoots, even though they happened a year or more ago. This is probably because I run a slide show of my photos on a computer at work all day long. Every day or so, I pick a different set of photos to watch. So, in a way, I'm always reviewing them! Paint me crazy, but I always enjoy looking at them.