Back Sparkle

I’m flying to Israel today, currently blogging this during a 9 hour layover in Toronto. I’ll be spending the summer there doing research at The Weizmann Institute.

By the way, a neat trick I routinely employ for getting a bottle of water inside airport security- bring in an empty bottle, then fill it with a cold water fountain water once you've past them.

Below is a picture I just took this morning flying out of Newark. It looks pretty dull in this version (which isn't really edited much) so open the full sized version to see the neat stuff. The sparkles that you see appear in the anti solar point. (This is the same point where the aformentioned "Glory" effect occurs). Basically its all the various manmade objects out there (mostly on roads) which reflect light in the direction that it came from (roadsigns, highway lane markers, cars reflectors next to headlights . . . ).

The zoomed in version

And the zoomed out version, only that spot has the sparkles

then- when the plane and the sun and this reflective spot on the ground are all in a line- then you see a sparkle from the sunlight reflected directly back at you (not scattered back like the usual). Notice the square green sparkle (in full size version) is a normal interstate roadsign.

By the way, I gave a “Tech Talk” at Google NYC last week. I’ll be blogging about it once the youtube video is up so you all can see it.