Friday 16 September 2011

Parhelion

Yesterday was the private view of the work at West Coker. Three very lovely girls were helping Simon with car parking and the like, I asked them to have a lie on the cloud bench, this first young lady did and she exclaimed she could see a rainbow,


we all looked up and there wasn't a rainbow in site just a beautiful sunny evening with a scattering of clouds, she insisted she could see a rainbow, so after cajoling I lay on the bench and blow me down if I could see the fragment of a rainbow amongst the cloud base, blimey you are right I exclaimed and we tried to figure out how this might be in a sky with no hint of rain. One of the girls muttered something about rain droplets in the sky, or ice crystals.
Later more people came to lie on the cloud bench which was proving to be very popular, I got talking to a woman as she was waiting and she said, " did you see the Parhelion tonight" of course I had to ask her what a Parhelion was, and very basically it is ice crystals in the autumn cooling sky that gets hit by the sun and produces a spectrum usually in pairs.


Of course I was able to exclaim "yes, you bet" and in a rather over excited schoolboy fashion I blathered on about how we saw it, I then of course went off to find the three young woman and told them of their find. Naturally they were delighted to hear of such a phenomena and that they had seen it.
There are many reasons why everyone should own a 'cloud bench' anyway, but I feel that this has strengthened my position and expect the commissions to rush in: so please email me at michaelfairfax@eclipse.co.uk with your orders.

the wikipedia definition of a Parhelion is:
A 120° parhelion (plural: 120° parhelia) is a relatively rare halo, an optical phenomenon occasionally appearing along with very bright sun dogs (also called parhelia) as ice crystal-saturatedcirrus clouds fill the atmosphere. The 120° parhelia are named for appearing in pair on the parhelic circle ±120° from the sun.[1]


5 comments:

  1. These are stunning. Every stately home should have one. Artistic bullseye.

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  2. Fabulous M, even without the parhelion! And so sorry i didn't make the West Coker gig... just SOOO booked up don't ya know... actually been having a great time outdoors in all this wild weather getting Swiss students to write ecopoetry... :-) Did you play those instruments?

    Rx

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  3. The gig is on the 2nd October at 6.00. So still time! Fear not we shall film it and it will go on a blog somewhere. Yes I will be playing those instruments.
    So you have been down in my tintagel....Michael xxxx

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  4. :-( running a workshop on 2nd. What d'ya mean YOUR Tintagel? (Dyn Tagell). Who's the Cornishwoman here? Quite right - it's not you. :-) (And yes I know you did a thing here - a big thing - with Ralph Hoyte too, yes? - where is it??)x

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  5. Start with the new square I created, et al....(no I did't work with Ralph he had already done stuff before)....then the sound cairn ....then the new walk around the cliffs via touchstone poems...back to the square....so my tintagel young cornishwoman....designed in Somerset!!! x...I will walk you around it one day with maybe a joust in merlin's cave!

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