The Leeward Islands missed by a hair.... Omar passes on through...

It's Sky Watch Friday post time!! Please visit Tom, Klaus, Sandy, Ivar, Wren, Fishing Guy and Imac's SKY WATCH BLOG to participate in Sky Watch Fridays, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND!! A huge thank you to Dot, the mother of this fabulous blogging event!!! It is so interesting to see skies from all over the world!!! How truly wonderful it is to be a part of something as incredible as Sky Watch Friday! Today, I would like to share with you my sky this morning. We had an amazing double lunar corona in the western sky as we awaited Mini-Dew's bus this morning.

A corona is produced by the diffraction of light from either the Sun or the Moon by individual small water droplets (and sometimes tiny ice crystals) of a cloud. The corona consists of small number of concentric colored rings around the celestial object and a central bright aureole. The angular size of the corona depends on the diameters of the cloud droplets - small droplets produce bright coronae. Coronae differ from haloes in that the latter are formed by refraction from comparatively large rather than small ice crystals. Reddish colors always occupy the outer part of a corona's ring.
~source

I only wish that my photographs did it justice. I played with settings until I literally ran out of time. I am always impressed with coronae. Here are several different looks at it. Ours today was inspired by some outrageous fog... the thickness brought visibility in most of the area down to about 100 yards. It was so thick that I could actually see the mist in it between myself and the car in front of me and had to use wipers. Talk about being on cloud 9. More like cloud 9 was on me. The fog started to thin out as the sun started to rise; however, it's still extremely thick out there.

Onto the tropics, the Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, St. Martin, St. Kitts and Nevis Islands are breathing a sigh of relief today in the wake of the near miss by MAJOR Hurricane Omar over-night last night. That's right, the very strong yet compact Omar breezed (quite literally) right through the islands of the northern Leeward Islands, neglecting to make landfall and moving quickly on out to the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane Omar, though compact in size, packed a powerful punch that was thankfully missed out on by the islands. At his maximum strength, he was carrying in his swath, sustained winds up to 125mph, as a category 3 hurricane! His fast movement is a good thing. He didn't even stick around to drench the islands with rain, which is good since they are still recovering from the impacts of the devastatingly torrential rain impacts of Hanna. Interesting little tidbit, Omar is moving so fast, that he's outracing NOAA's satellite floater, which is set up to capture images of him. Wow, a major hurricane in mid-October. Crazy.

On the flip side, the remnants of Tropical Depression 16 are being highlighted as a low risk system. Tropical Depression 16 happens to be the first tropical depression of the season to have not been named. It's been an active year.

That's it for me... still recovering from my pain in the neck.

Have a lovely day,
~Dewdrop