The Lowitz Club

Hi guys! Got some great news, I'm officially a member of The Lowitz Club! This happened a few months ago actually, on Friday, August 23rd. So, Friday really had become a day of halos for me, since I've seen almost all of my rare halos on that day. Circumzenithal arc, Parry arc, Supralateral arc, and now, the Lowitz arc is seen on Friday! It's confirmed by Les Cowley himself, the man who made the Atmospheric Optics website (atoptics.co.uk), a great reference of knowledge for your atmospheric phenomenon interests. The one I've seen is the upper Lowitz, a part of the Lowitz arc that's the most seen and photographed (I think). Les also pointed out that it might also have the rarer lower Lowitz arc, but he said he needed more photos to confirm that this is not just a cloud streak. The thing is, I've not only seen the Lowitz arcs on that day. There's also the rare suncave Parry arc, and then the more common arc; upper tangent arc, 22-degree radius, the right hand side of the parhelion, and bits of a parhelic circle. So, the Lowitz arc, seen by myself, an Indonesian on the tropics, seeing one of the exotic halos usually seen on higher latitudes in Europe. You lot might not feel the same way as I am, but I'm really ecstatic about it! And behold, here it is, the Lowitz arc!

Here are the two original (or edited a bit) photos that I sent to Les :

And here are the enhanced photo sent back by him :

So there we are! A Lowitz arc appearing on our very own skies in Bandung. Sorry for being late (WAY TOO LATE, 4 MONTHS LATE!) to post about it. I actually wanted to upload this to the blog quickly, but my motivation seemed to die down and it got delayed. And now, while I have that little bit of motivation, I can finally post the pictures. Sorry for anybody who waited to see this blog updated! 

Hope you enjoyed it! My blog entry after a long while~ :D

OPOD - Optics Picture of The Day!

Hey guys! If you didn't know, this past 3-5 days or so I've been featured as the photo on atmoshperic optics website's OPOD! Here's the link : http://atoptics.co.uk/fz909.htm. It's about a sighting I've seen recently on Mt. Bromo, about the fogbow and other sightings I also saw that day. Check it out yourself on the link! :D

Something to Write About?

So finally I got something to write about. Well, I usually have something to write about anyway, but ending up not able to write it up here. I don't know whether I'm still going to write about the sighting 2 years ago, where I saw my best multiple halo displays in just a short space of time. Well now, I'm going to post about my most recent impressive sighting I've seen in months.

Oh, and another thing. All my grades are out!! I'm very surprised because it's not my lowest grade at all! Far from it! I'm just very thankful to God that the grades came out very good indeed... I'm very happy!

Ahem, so let's continue on the topic of halos. The first one happened on April 19th this year. That day, I firstly saw the usual 22-degree radius. Then, I look up. At first, I'm not quite expecting anything to be honest, because the sun itself was already quite high on the sky (about 7.20 AM, according to the EXIF data). I couldn't believe my eyes because I saw another halo! This halo curves upwards opposite to the sun and have some bright colors, so the most appropriate halo to go with it was the Circumzenithal Arc, or just CZA to be short. This is the first time I saw one, after years of yearning to see this very beautiful halo. But then, when I look closely, another halo is also present. It's another circle, but it touches the CZA and about twice as far as the 22-degree one. I'm quite convinced that this is the Supralateral Arc. This is much rarer than the CZA, so I'm also very surprised (and happy) that I got to see one. On closer inspection on the photo, I also spotted something resembling the Upper Tangent Arc. This is expected, since the ice crystals of this arc is the same orientation with the ones creating the supralateral. So that's the first sighting to go with you. Here are the pics. These were edited to exaggerate the displays, since it's not that visible on the camera.

Here's the explanation on the halos :

That's about it on the first sighting. Let's move on to the second one. It's just happened a few days ago on May 30th, just before I went on my holiday to Yogyakarta with plane. As I arrived at the airport, I noticed beautiful crepuscular rays coming through from the clouds. I took a photo of it, then as usual trying to look for signs of halos (since the clouds looks like a good halo-making ones), and when I look up overhead... yep you guessed it. It's another CZA. But this time, since it's quite early in the morning (around 7 o'clock, from the EXIF) the CZA is much more spread out than the ones from April 19th. I am very happy indeed, since the CZA just seems to elude me from time to time. Now, I got two sightings in just under two months! How happy could I be? So of course, I just took photo of it. And the CZA this time is much more beautiful than from the sighting before - as I noted, this is much bigger and have clearer colors since it's earlier in the morning. It's not as bright as I hoped for, but still... it made me really happy afterwards. The sighting last about less than an hour, since when I took the last of the photos, it's gone in a few minutes time. There's no other halo seen that day, though. Here are the photos. Again, the photos are edited.

So that's it! My first post about halos since a long, long time... Hope you enjoy it! Ta ta!

Bloody Hell...

Well, it's pretty much been a hell of a semester this term. Somehow, I got myself into 4 organizations in my college (previously not having any organizations to work with) and I found out that's too much for me to handle... A lot of my supposed job was being left undone, and other stuff like that... Most of it is either because I don't have time, or I don't have the motivation to do it. Or somewhere in between. It really is putting quite some burden on me, and my subject of study is not quite helping either... There's quite a big chance that this semester is going to be my lowest grade I have on my 2 year study here in ITB. Well, still hoping that's not going to be the case though.

About this blog, I'm still trying to keep it up. I found out that I have some writing from my Journalism class, so probably I'll just post them here. It's in Indonesian, and I don't plan on posting the English version since it's not that easy to translate the writing... Or maybe I could make them better if I did? Well, just stay tune (if there is even any of you reading this writing) if you did, hopefully I would make it in English. And also about the atmospheric photos, I got tons of them left on my hard disk. I always have the intention to post them, but somehow... It just didn't get posted. Dunno why... :/

Well, that's it for now then. I really, really need to keep writing to keep this blog up. Till next time, ta ta!

So, About Writing...

Hey guys! I'm now trying my best to keep on writing, and for that I took the "Journalism of Science and Technology" subject on my college. Yes, of course it's in Indonesian! I'm trying that subject for my (supposed) interest in writing, and hopefully in doing so I have more motivation to write (because that's my biggest problem for writing this blog to this dare). I don't know whether I'm going to go on with English or Indonesian with this blog, so I guess you'll just have to see what's next. Probably I'm going to write some article that I'm going to post in this blog, who knows? What's clear is I'm still going to post photos about halos in Indonesia! Well, see you next time! ;D

Finally!

And finally, I'm able to post photos again! Well, I'm not posting photos of THE two sightings just yet, because I couldn't quite find the right words to describe the sighting... At least, there's progress on the blog, right? :D

Anyway, here are some photo of the sightings, about a week plus worth. I couldn't post all the sightings from August till the recent ones, since it was too many... So I decided to post it in parts. Enjoy the part 1 then!

24th August sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Tubagus Ismail

26th August sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Tubagus Ismail

3rd September sighting of a 22-degree radius lunar halo at Tubagus Ismail

4th September sighting (possibly) of an upper tangent arc at Simpang Dago

 11th September sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Tubagus Ismail

 12th September sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB)

 13th September sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB)

 15th September sighting of a circumscribed solar halo and parhelic circle at Sentul City, Bogor

 16th September sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Tubagus Ismail

  17th September sighting of a 22-degree radius/circumscribed solar halo at Tubagus Ismail

*nocomment*

Really. What have I been doing these whole months? It seems like I have no time to write anything whatsoever... I didn't really lose the motivation to take a photo, but it seems like I have a really hard time on posting those pictures to the internet. Meh, probably because I'm too lazy? *shrugs*

Anyways, I'm on my final exam weeks, so don't expect much, even after I post this blog. I really, really hope I could still continue to post atmospheric optic photos in this blog... Let's hope that's going to be the result after the exams were done. :/


Oh, and by the way, I still haven't post the photos of the two incredible sightings yet. I'll make sure those two will be my priorities after I'm done with everything! See you later! :D