LoneSky

This "backwards" timelapse series of near true color images from Meteosat-12 show how dramatically the appearance of Earth can change with solar angle. The images were acquired on June 20, 2025, on the day of the Summer solstice. All the images were processed using a custom Python script which will be made available in an upcoming post. Rayleigh and Mie Scattering Two primary atmospheric light scattering phenomenon are Rayleigh scattering, which gives the sky its blue color, and Mie scattering, which gives clouds their white color. Mie is strongly forward scattering, meaning most of the light is scattered in the same direction as the incident light. It acts on particles roughly equal to or larger than the wavelength of light. As we will see, water molecules, dust, sand, and pollutants are all strong Mie scatterers. Rayleigh is approximately equal forward scattering and back scattering, with reduced scattering perpendicular to the incident light. It acts most strong...

Broken links are annoying. In order to better keep track of the constantly changing download URLs of the various satellite data referenced in this blog, this page has been created to host the most recent known working server locations. [UPDATE: May 29, 2026] Added DSCOVR EPIC data download information. [UPDATE: June 11, 2026] Added Chollian-2A data download information.   NOAA GOES-R SERIES For full-disk images in pseudo-true color, these are the two most useful products: Product: ABI-L1b-RadF Format: Individual bands; 10848 x 10848 resolution or higher. Product: ABI-L2-MCMIPF Format: Combined bands; 5424 x 5424 resolution. GOES-16 (EAST) ABI Download — 2017-2025: https://noaa-goes16.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#ABI-L1b-RadF/ https://noaa-goes16.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#ABI-L2-MCMIPF/ GOES-17 (WEST) ABI Download — 2018-2023: https://noaa-goes17.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#ABI-L1b-RadF/ https://noaa-goes17.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#ABI-L2-MCMIPF/ GO...

John Glenn Astronomy Park (JGAP) is a public astronomical observation facility located in Hocking Hills State Park, Ohio. In addition to several interesting design features , it was purpose-built to highlight the rising and setting Sun on the first day of each season. On these days, through angled slots in three pillars situated on both the east and west perimeters of the circular plaza, the Sun can be observed moving along a path parallel to the slots. The setting Sun through the Winter Solstice slot. There is also a pole that points to the North Celestial Pole. When viewed through the porthole in the central sphere, the viewer will see another sphere that crowns the top of the pole. Around the limb of this sphere, Polaris—the North Star—describes a partial arc over the course of the night and a complete arc over the course of a year. Looking at the North Celestial Pole. STELLARIUM LANDSCAPE I made a 360° spherical panorama—one of several over the last few months—incorpor...

One of the goals of this project was to carefully colorize the famous photograph by social reformer Jacob Riis, taken circa 1900, so that it would have the appearance of a modern digital camera image. Mulberry St., New York, N.Y. courtesy Library of Congress . How naive I was. The results in this low resolution proof-of-concept, though more convincing than other colorized Mulberry Street examples I've seen, fall far short. The best I can say is that some parts of it look like old Kodachrome film. Mulberry Street colorized by LoneSky. I knew it would be tedious due to the astonishing amount of detail present in the image. I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to give it a convincingly modern look. The problem—one of the many difficulties of colorizing old photographs—is with the characteristic tone response of the original medium. Before 1906, commercial film was sensitive to just shorter wavelength light—blue and green. It even recorded some of the ultraviol...

I am posting these two colorizations I made of 1940s starlet Veronica Lake without any commentary on Lake herself. There are loads of great glamour photos of her available online. I don't even remember where I got them but they should not be hard to find with an image search. I wanted to try a few techniques I've seen other colorists employ, notably by the prolific and talented Jecinci . These are color fringing/chroma noise and colored backlighting. To my eye at least, the former give the work a photographic feel, simulating lens artifacts and color film grain, while the latter adds visual punch. Veronica Lake colorized with amber backlighting. For the backlighting I added a layer with the blend mode set to overlay. Then I simply painted over the areas where I thought light should fall. The blend mode does a lot of the work. There are different ways to simulate color fringing. For these images I separated the colorized photographs into their red, green, and blue compo...