Thursday, April 16, 2009 - Elephant Butte Lake State Park, Elephant Butte NM
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Sunset, South Monticello Area, Elephant Butte Lake State Park, Elephant Butte NM, April 15, 2009
My new Panasonic FZ28 camera's first sunset was a beaut too
I played with my new camera off and on all day yesterday trying to find my way through its extensive settings with the help of a pretty useless and confusing operators manual. At least the menu system on this camera is a little more intuitive than the one in my old Canon - maybe I stand a fighting chance of getting control over this one. Then I topped the day off with a bunch of sunset pictures.
Is that a virga I see below that cloud?
Maybe that accounts for some of the gusty winds we had here most of the day yesterday. Wikipedia describes a virga as:
In meteorology, virga is an observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground. At high altitudes the precipitation falls mainly as ice crystals before melting and finally evaporating; this is usually due to compressional heating, because the air pressure increases closer to the ground. It is very common in the desert and in temperate climates. It is also common in the Southern United States during summer.
Virga can cause very interesting weather effects, because as rain is changed from liquid to vapor form, it removes heat from the air due to the high heat of vaporization of water. In some instances, these pockets of colder air can descend rapidly, creating a dry microburst which can be extremely hazardous to aviation. Conversely, precipitation evaporating at high altitude can compressionally heat as it falls, and result in a gusty downburst which may substantially and rapidly warm the surface temperature. This fairly rare phenomenon, a heat burst, also tends to be of exceedingly dry air.
Night camp
Site 32, South Monticello Point - Elephant Butte Lake State Park, Elephant Butte NM
- Verizon cell phone service - very good
- Verizon EVDO service - very good
- Find other references to Elephant Butte on this website
- List the nights I've camped here
- Go to the Elephant Butte Lake State Park website
- Get a Google map of this area
- Check the weather here
Life is to be Lived, Not Controlled
No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there's an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern.
.... Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? - diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that were to happen. .....Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.