The difficult part of creating the calendar was selecting the photographs. An hour in the Pacific Northwest will easily yield a year of calendar pages. It took me a day to pick the twenty or so photos that I had taken over the year. The photograph of two dissipation trails (above) is in the calendar. "Distrails" are a relatively rare phenomenon resulting from jet planes flying through a layer of high cirrocumulus and cirrostratus clouds. They form in a few ways: When the heat of the exhaust warms the cloud layer and causes the evaporation of the water particles in the cloud; when turbulence from the plane mixes drying surrounding air into the cloud and causes evaporation; or when the tiny particles in the exhaust "seed" the cloud and cause the water droplets to freeze, grow, fall, and evaporate in the warmer air below the cloud. I snapped this rare double-distrail from my front yard.
Here are some of the other picks from 2009. If you'd like to order a calendar from Shutterfly, send me a note and I'll send you the link. If you'd like a homemade potholder, you're on your own.
