Clear and Cold

It was a clear, cloudless morning with a moderate temperature inversion. I kind of liked the way the sky looked as I got a ride into the university (again!) but by the time I got my camera, the moment and viewpoint passed. This was taken about an hour and a half before sunrise. I looked at the Exif data on the photo to get the time and discovered that the time zone was still set to the time zone for Tokyo. I guess I am the type that needs automation to take care of things like that when I don't remember.

I think the sky color in the first picture is closer to what it actually was. I suspect that maybe all of the sodium street lights are messing things up.  I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but the winter storm that we had last week had left ~14,000 people without power. For some, they just got power restored and I think that I read that there may be still ~1,000 without power. At these temperatures, not being able to run the boiler or furnace could be a problem. Lots of downed trees with wind gusts of 70 mph last week on Wednesday night! Weird weather.

You can clearly see the thick layer of pollution formed by the temperature inversion. Alaska is blessed by some of the cleanest air unless you visit Fairbanks during a temperature inversion. Normally, the air gets colder as your altitude increases. With a temperature inversion, the air is colder at ground level and gets warmer as you move up. An example of this is that while it is -30 something in town (down low) it was only -20°F at our house (a little bit in the hills). Normally, exhaust smoke rises towards colder. denser air but now it heads for ground level. So instead of dispersing, it gets concentrated. The air in town is extremely unhealthy during these weather conditions.

This morning, it was -27°F and has been getting colder as the day has progressed. This is not weird weather or even exceptionally cold for this time of year. Last month, I was kind of hoping to be able to ride until Thanksgiving but after the winter storm and now this, I'll pass. I remember quite a few Thanksgivings when it was well below -40°F/C and the power company having problems keeping up with the demands. Too many ovens on at the same time.

Next Tuesday evening, we will be heading for St. Paul, MN, for about a week. Hopefully, it'll be warmer than here.

BTW, I originally uploaded the first two pictures in jpeg format and the online versions looked horrible compared to the originals. Not the original RAW images but the jpegs on the local drive after exporting them from Aperture. I then exported them in png format, uploaded them and they look much better. This is the first time I've experienced this difference.

It looks like the pictures are now automatically uploaded to Google+ which then it wants to apply some sort of "auto-enhance" function which ruined the picture (in my humble opinion).

Update - Auto-enhance and auto-awesome are turned on by default. They can be disabled within your Google+ settings. The auto-awesome function is the creation of little movies when you upload a series of similar photos. Google assumes that you would've made a movie if you were smarter. (Not a Google fan in case you couldn't tell)