What can you say about a penny, a McDonald's knife, and two pieces of glass entombed in an asphalt road?
Cigarette butts and other leftovers, blown together by the wind.
Slightly modified version of the cigarette butts picture.
Footprints in snow, with illusion.
Wave extent pattern 2
Sand and quarter. Note holes in sand from little critters that burrow around in it.
Wave
Sandstone minus 10^4 years
Crocheted cross soaking in Mason jar.
The snowflakes were of fairly uniform size; the differential you see here represents the depth between the camera and the house across the street. Like stars in the three-dimensional galaxy, they appear to cluster into patterns, snowy "constellations". Though I guess that would be "conflakations".
ice cover on glass, with tiny cracks.
Rainbow over student housing.
As we drove along Jersey St. in Bloomington, the morning sun warmed everything it touched to steaming hot. East-facing rooftops, telephone poles, east-facing fences, all shed their thin coat of frost as visible water vapor. Even bushes were steaming... on their East sides. But "steaming hot" means only a few degrees above the chilly air temperature, not really hot at all. And the water, once evaporated (sublimated?) instantly condensed into visible form in the humid air.
Limestone inclusions in foundation of (long-gone) building in Hannibal, Missouri 2007
Leaves and cigarette pack, as deposited by the wind
Strong wind going over wall created lift effect that sucked the trash bag right out of the barrel.
The floating bubbles appear to dampen waves.
Seasons, on a car instead of a planet
Differential absorption of energy from sunlight. This is why soot makes a difference on ice caps and glaciers.
I have a gadget which consists of a long pole with a snow scraper on the end. After a recent heavy snow, I removed snow from about the bottom 1m of the roof on my house to prevent ice dams from forming. As I put the gadget away, on impulse I removed snow from the garage roof above the door. Notice how the gutter is clear of snow downstream from that area, but not upstream. It gives the appearance that clearing snow above a given section of the gutter somehow sets in motion a mechanism that clears it "downstream" of that area. But see the next picture for the real reason...
I wanted to know if my perception that clearing a section of the roof set in motion a "downstream clearing" of the gutter. (see previous picture) So this time, I cleared a different section of the gutter from the previous time and *lookee!* The cleared section of roof had nothing to do with the cleared gutter. More likely (and still open to alternative hypotheses) the extent of the sun determines how far the gutter clears. Certainty based on the previous observation would have kept me from finding this out.
A wall in the parking garage on the south end of the Illinois State University campus, just as the sun grazes the rough concrete surface. Those couple minutes you can actually watch the shadows moving across the surface; an exquisitely sensitive sundial formed by hundreds of uneven features on a vertical wall.
Thin metal leaves from anti-shoplifting tags, suspended in the magnetic lines of force from a neodymium magnet under a peanut butter jar lid. You can drop the leaves from any height and they'll arrange themselves this way. Move the jar lid from side to side (the magnet is sitting on the tabletop under it) and the leaves will tilt but not fall over. Move the jar lid far enough and they'll scoot over, but not fall over. It looks very, very unnatural...
Sandstone rock with liesegang banding.
It's supposed to cool off at night.
Record snow and rain saturates soil. Record heat wave evaporates water so tropical plants are thriving in Illinois. "Cold" front moves in dropping temp to mere 80 f. i80 gets closed due to flooding. Even rained a bit here.
Chicken bones immersed in vinegar some time in the mid-nineties. Jar was full when put on shelf behind stairs. Picture made in January 2012.
Venus and Jupiter, 13 March 2011 at about 9pm CDT. Jupiter is the slightly blue one at left. While it is many times the size of Venus, in this picture it is much, much farther away.
