This scene occured the first night we were out, banded cirrus shared the nighty sky with the stars making for a cool scene with the full moon and bright snow cover.
The tree in the parking lot area casted a cool shadow on the snow pack with the stars glittering above. The distant horizon is the view from the top of the hill... pretty sweet for being in the corn fields and plains of Iowa.
The second night we saw this moon halo poking out amongst the cirrus with the stars shinning through. It was one of the better ones I've seen with the full spectrum of colors visible for a short time before disappearing into thicker clouds. Sorry for the ugly lens flare.
Im honestly fairly certain that I didn't use my camera the 3rd night, clouds screwed up our aurora opportunities and high winds messed up the fog hopes. The next night, a dense fog advisory had been issued, it had us all thinking we wouldnt be able to get above it even on the hills. Earlier in the evening I had gone outside with my dog and noticed I could see stars through the top of the fog. I called Mike and he had the same thing going on. He decided to head out and called saying that there was low dense fog from about Modale up to almost Little Sioux. We both thought it would be spreading north and the brisk southerly winds giving us an awesome sea of fog to shoot from Murray Hill. On my way up the fog was so dense you could see 2-3 highway dashes in front of you, but still see the moon and stars poking out above. It was surreal. I exited the fog on the way to Murray to join Mike. The photo above is Mike shooting the river of fog flowing through the hills to our east. The other insane thing was the wind gusts... almost knocking us over at times at what had to be nearly 50mph.
This is just what I thought was a cool scene, the grass blowing along a fence line as the haze cuts off our view.
We decided to head down into the fog and see what we could get as it wasnt getting any closer to our here. This image is near the Modale cemetary. This wierd verticle bands were streaming overhead as the moonlit fog contrasted with the textured wind whipped snow. One cool thing that was nearly impossible to get on a still image was the fog blowing at highspeed in front of the moon due to the winds. It almost had a tunnel effect.
This final image was as the low ground fog cleared out... a weak warm front lifted over us putting an end to our fog as the air temperature increased enough to not remain saturated. By now it was nearly 4am and I returned home to sleep, only to be out the next night when the CME from the solar flares hit. Ill have a few other images and some various timelapse footage that I shot of these scenes up soon, until then enjoy the images and let me know what you think!
