Massimo's photoblog

Another aerial photo I took while flying to Tucson, Arizona, this January. The landscape in this area was a flat desert surrounded by mountain ridges at the horizon, half covered by the mid afternoon mist. The dirtiness of the airplane window, and the haze, conspired to produce this heavy blue cast on the photo, with no color correction on my part (I only enhanced the contrast, which resulted in these deeper colors). This was the only snow-capped mountain in the whole area.

Southern Arizona (here we are almost at the border with Mexico) is quite dry, but there are occasional heavy precipitation in the elevated areas. I was once observing at the IOTA interferometer, and the sky had been clear for several days straight. It was at the end of December of a few years ago. Then suddenly it become cloudy, and started to snow heavily. After one hour we already had several inches of snow, and the snow shower was more like one of the blizzards that we have here in Boston. Since the only access to the observatory is a steep mountain unpaved road we had to evacuate quickly before getting stuck (I know of people that got stuck at the observatory for several days before the road was reopened). When we reached the office building at the base of the mountain it was still snowing, with an inch of snow covering the cacti and Saguaros of the usually dry Arizona desert. It was a most weird experience.