reflections in the ionosphere part two & a beeyootiful sunset

You are definitely going to have to click on some of these shots to make ’em biggerer. The big girl camera makes a difference, but not as much as I’d hoped it would.
Why yes, I do think that I should always be able to clearly see all atmospheric phenomena with nothing more than my kit lens or the Fooj at full zoom! 😀

It was late afternoon, between 315-330, when I caught the first faint reflections. The two pictures below were taken about 3 minutes apart.

When I saw them up close, my first guess was reflections of the tall Cedar Point roller coasters. They are too far out to be the real thing, as Cedar Point from here appears between the closer point of land and the nuclear reactor tower. (You’ll see where I’m talking about in the second shot below.) Usually when we can see Cedar Point clearly from here, it’s a really calm and sunny day and it’s very obvious what you’re looking at.

I went back at sunset and caught more than I ever expected. Thankfully I had taken some shots during my earlier visit that included land and no reflections so that I had some basis for comparison. The first 2 are from the early visit and the three after are from the sunset visit.

These two were taken six minutes apart:

As the sun sunk below the horizon, I noticed flashing lights amongst the reflections:

Since I’m a day late and you might have had to work a little to see these very cool reflections, I wanted to leave you with something that you can just sit back and enjoy…

posted 5/5/13 for 5/4/13