North Atlantic Skyline

Cloudbusting

John Smyth — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:33:14 +0000

Rainclouds billowing over Abbey Hill in the Burren and flowing into Galway Bay. Picture taken last year.

Aphids

John Smyth — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:49:26 +0000

Until last weeks, the lupins in my garden remained stubbornly unblossomed. Then the sun made a guest appearance in Ireland last week, and they all exploded into columns of colour – about 6 weeks later than normal. Before the flowers appeared, the plants had to survive a massive swarm of bugs – greenfly and assorted aphids began munching their way through the plants. The bugs in the picture above are tough – the ones that survived the several applications of bug spray.

International Space Station passing over Lough Corrib

John Smyth — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:26:25 +0000

On Saturday night/Sunday morning, the International Space Station was visible in the night sky as it flew over Ireland. The three images above show the ISS as a streak of light as it passed over Lough Corrib at 11.30pm Saturday night [middle picture], just after 1 am on Sunday morning [top picture] and 2.43 am [bottom picture]. Though I didn’t notice it at the time, there was another object visible in the sky (left, in the bottom picture) – either a shooting star or an Iridium flare. In the top two pictures, the land formation in the foreground is Drumsnauv (& the Hill of Doon) (Google Maps link here), the entrance to a narrow channel in Lough Corrib, at the northern end of the lake. You can see another picture of the lake, taken from the same position, in this picture, taken two and a half years ago. The lights at the other side of the lake are from Headford (where Ross Errilly is located).

As the ISS appeared overhead on the final pass of the night, I could still hear a cuckoo down in the valley near Cornamona that had begun calling around midnight.

Fireworks over Carrick-on-Shannon

John Smyth — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:23:28 +0000

Part of the fireworks display on the river Shannon at Carrick-on-Shannon in Co. Leitrim on Sunday night. The structure on the foreground is a boardwalk along the river. Right now, the floorboards on the boardwalk is probably 2 metres above the water level. During the severe floods of 2009, the water flowed at least a foot above those boards.