A tropical disturbance west of Baja California in the Eastern Pacific Ocean brought these feathery cirrus clouds over Arizona today as another low-pressure area over the pacific interacted with the tropical air aloft. Verna took this photo of the house from the driveway as we were getting ready to go shopping this afternoon. It was just another beautiful second spring day. Click on the image to enlarge.
When Hurricane Newton entered southern Arizona, it brought a lot of cloud cover to our area and a few very minor sprinkles of rain. But last evening and this evening’s sunsets were vivid red as the sun set in the west.
I took both of these images from the courtyard with my Canon EOS Rebel. Click on either image to enlarge.
You can already see the mid-afternoon cumulus clouds building up over the house in this panorama. Two hours later, it was pouring rain on this sunny location as the clouds continued to build into what turned out to be a nice, but badly-needed rain shower.
So far this summer monsoon season, we have only had the bare necessity rain without the flash flooding in our area. We think that if the heavy monsoons hit that we will be OK with our retaining walls and the new little creek that Verna and I fashioned out of rocks on the west side of the lot.
The cirrus clouds in front of the sun contained enough ice crystals to create this rainbow halo around the sun today here in Wickenburg. It was 82 degrees and an absolutely beautiful day.
I was photographing some work that we did in the rock and cactus garden this afternoon, when I noticed the solar halo. I walked over to the shadow of the big saguaro out front by the garage to get this shot. I adjusted the gamma shading and chromatic saturation of the image a bit to get this nice effect of a “divine saguaro.”
This little bucket which sits under the rain spout by the patio serves to not only collect rain runoff, but to provide a reservoir suitable for our little winged friends to get a drink of water. There generally are no places where water stands for very long in our arid environment, so we’re happy to provide a place for the birds and other critters to get water.
I had a birdbath set up out back for quite a while before the monsoon winds and showers totaled it out. This bucket takes the place of the fragile glass fixture that we still find shards from, while not endangering the critters that take advantage of it.
We have no direct evidence of it, but we suspect that squirrels, roadrunners, bunnies, coyotes, mule deer and other assorted local critters take advantage of the water. Someday, we might get photographic evidence of that and post it here.
This is the most colorful sunset of this year! However, there are bound to be a lot more as colorful and more in the coming year. Happy New Year!
Click on the image to enlarge.
