Another round for Hurricane Bertha, truly the come-back kid!

Happy Sky Watch Friday!! It's post time!!! (Please visit our host, Tom's blog to participate in Sky Watch Fridays. So much fun!!! I highly recommend it!) This picture was taken in metro Atlanta, around Thanksgiving of 2006.This was a beautiful sunset that produced my first ever sundogs.

("A sun dog or sundog (scientific name parhelion, plural parhelia, for "beside the sun") is a common bright circular spot on a solar halo. It is an atmospheric optical phenomenon primarily associated with the reflection or refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals making up cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Often, two sun dogs can be seen (one on each side of the sun) simultaneously.")

Here is a photograph of the sun dog from that day (basically a rainbow formed in the ice crystals in cirrus clouds)... I loved the contrails.

("Contrails or vapour trails are condensation trails and Artificial clouds made by the exhaust of aircraft engines or wingtip vortices which precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in moist, frigid upper air. However, vapour trails or contrails generated by engine exhaust are inevitably linked with typical fuel combustion pollutants.")

I loved the way the sky lit up with a golden color...

(Why are sunsets sometimes golden in color???? Far on the horizon, to the West, it is daylight. The distant clouds and dust create a diffuse white glow (Mie scattering) with all wavelengths of light. As the daylight travels east toward your eye, the blue hues are scattered toward to ground (Rayleigh scattering). Sun rays have to traverse long distances through the dense parts of the atmosphere until they reach the eye of the observer with the sun close to or even below the horizon. The traversed layer of the atmosphere is more than 30 times longer compared to the sun standing directly above the observer.The violets and blues are lost (they make the sky blue to the West of you). The light you see is missing the violets and blues... leaving you with various shades of yellows and reds.")~source

... and silhouetted the house.

Well, I was just studying the track of category 2 (expected to increase to category 3 soon) Hurricane Bertha. Looks like during the last couple of captures, she took more of a western track than the northwestern track she had been on. Many more westerward jumps like that could largely impact her interaction with Bermuda. The current forecast puts Hurricane Bertha to the east of Bermuda, but her westward movement during the last hour might change that. As it stands, she is a beautiful category 2 hurricane, with better looking symmetry as she works out some of the dry air that worked at her southern portion yesterday.

1100 PM AST WED JUL 09 2008

...BERTHA EXPECTED TO MOVE MORE SLOWLY BUT COULD REGAIN MAJOR HURRICANE STATUS...

Another round at category 3 is potentially in her future... crazy storm.

An update: 3:15PM Looking pretty-ful... again.Update 7/11 Hurricane Bertha still a category 1 hurricane... 12:45 pic...Looks like she's taking aim at Bermuda to me... What the heck is Bermuda doing out in the middle of the ocean anyhow?!

Have a lovely day!
~Dewdrop