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Freaky sky
This is the age of the smartphone. The blogosphere is, no doubt, awash with many photos of the really freaky sky over France and much of England. The reason is fairly simple, hurricane Ophelia was making its way up the edge of Europe on a direct target for Ireland, and as it went, the rotation of the winds meant that it sucked sand particles from the Sahara and smoke from the fires in Portugal and spread it all across the sky along the western edge of Europe.
We know this. Because we have televisions and meteorology. Where I am, you'd never realise a violent hurricane was raging maybe 300-400 miles to the west. The air was calm, but the sky was weird yesterday and full on nuts today. Imagine in pre-biblical times if such a thing happened. Nobody would know it was the effects of a distant hurricane. Nobody would know of desert dust. Nobody would know of fires in Portugal, or of Portugal... Instead, the village elders would look at the sky and declare that the Gods must be appeased, and by the end of the day the village would be missing a few virgins.
Of, course, the winds will pass and the rains will come and by tomorrow or maybe the day after, the skies will return to normal. Clearly murdering innocent young girls in the name of insane troll sky fairies is the reason why the apocalypse didn't happen...
Enjoy the photos. Then go light those pyres...
These photos were taken with my S7 in Pro mode. That way I could override all of the phone's attempts to auto-correct the pictures, and set the white balance to the "cloudy sky" setting and lock off the exposure. By doing that, what I saw on the screen matchec what I was seeing in reality.
This first photo was taken at around twenty to three in the afternoon. That's the sun. Welcome to the beginnings of a nuclear winter.
It got seriously dark around half past four, but unfortunately I was working at that time. I did manage to talk the girls in stock into going and taking a look, to which they exclaimed the immortal phrase "oh, la vache!" (yes, that does mean "oh the cow"; the French also have the word "vachement" which means "really", I guess this obsession with cows is to be expected in a rural community!).
I finished work an hour later and the sky was lighter, but still pretty "where are the horsemen then?". This is looking south-east(ish).
And finally looking south. You can see it's lighter on the right (the west), that'll be the stuff blowing through on its way to give Teresa May in Brussels a legitimate reason for coughing...
I've seen Saharan dust in the sky. Ain't never seen anything like this though. I was hoping for a spectacular sunset, but the sky-sludge was so thick that the sun fizzled out around half three or so and never reappeared.
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Mick, 16th October 2017, 23:59
Bizarre! Nice thin coating of sand on cars in the morning?
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