Saturday, May 16, 2009

Travel to the smog

kw: travel notes, successes, stereophotography

On the way out to California again, with a much smoother experience this time. I like flying through DFW when going coast to coast, because it makes six hours of air travel into two three-hour legs with a break in between. Contrary to my experience in April, there were no weather problems or canceled flights. When we landed and the plane pulled up to the gate, there at the next gate was our next aircraft. The notice board shown here told it all. I was particularly glad because this time I had my family with me, and shenanigans like winding up at the wrong airport would have caused multiplied stress. Two smooth flights, a nice mix of talking with my wife and son, reading and working crossword puzzles made the day about as good as a travel day gets.


On the way into the Ontario airport, we descended through the top of the smog layer. I remember in decades past this would be very brown or orange, but it is not that intense any more. The two images that make up this pair were taken a few seconds (and thus about a thousand feet horizontally) apart.

I took care to clip these from the original images to show a good stereo pair of the mountains, properly framed. The images are in order for straight-eyed viewing, NOT crossed eyes. Hold a sheet of notebook paper so that it nearly touches your nose, and is lined up with the center, the boundary between the two halves of the image. Relax until the right eye sees the right part and the left eye sees the left part, and the mountains will be in 3D. The foreground will not appear in 3D because it is too close, and most of it moved completely out of the frame.

We landed at midday, which gave us time for a few other events before the day ended, but that is a subject for another time.

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