Things I Like: Frost Shadows
Posted on February 3, 2012 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
That’s when the rising sun melts the frost on the ground except for where the frost was covered by a shadow. And then the frost takes on the shape of the shadow. It’s like having a shadow in negative. Until it melts. Just one of those cool things you get to see every once in a while. Thought I’d share.
I’ve never thought about it before… but you’re right. This is kind of cool.
The Name of My Next Band: Frost Shadows
Things I like better: No frost at all. Nice picture.
Jason!:
Way ahead of you.
Oh very lovely. Thanks for sharing :)
They are cool….as long as they are in somebody else’s backyard. In mine, it’s just another reminder that it’s too groudon cold.
I love them too. When I taught at Western State of Colorado, the big main building on campus, Taylor Hall, would sometimes cast an immense frost shadow halfway across the quad in front of it, even sometimes preserving details as small as a couple of feat across. I’m not sure why they were so sharp edged; maybe the greater altitude (7500 feet) (lower pressure and more intense sunlight) or the often ultra low humidity, all of which would tend to make for much more rapid sublimation.
:-O
I’ve only seen frost twice this year, and that is unusal for where i live. Frost and the scrape scrape scrape of windshield cleaning in the morning is a normal thing, much like bacon and eggs… but mostly bacon.
Of course we haven’t seen any freezing rain either which is also a happens-too-often kinda thing here.
I just remembered about frost flowers. I saw a documentary about them on KET a while ago. There is a YouTube video trailer that shows some of them here
I don’t know if embedding video will work, but I’m going to give it a try.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fa6ml4S1Lg&w=560&h=315%5D
We had some of those here in southeastern Washington state this very morning, and I was also thinking how nifty they were! Great minds thinking alike?
They are very neat, but don’t last long as the sun rises and the shadows move.
Kind of like rainbows, you have to be in the right place at the right time
These are significantly less cool when you have to scrape them off your windshield in the morning, though. stupid tree.
awesome photo!
John – I occasionally make luminaria labyrinths for people to walk. Last November, I was invited by a group to make one at a park on the north end of Whidbey Island. Set it up and it went quite well and I turned in at midnight. Next morning, I went to clean it up and found frost shadows in the shape of the labyrinth. Too damn cool.
This is lovely, thank you for sharing!
I lived with a guy once who had a hobby he called shadow-taping, which this reminds me of. He’d go out at night with a big roll of masking tape and find something which the street-lights gave an interestingly-shaped shadow. He’d then cover the shadowed area with tape so that when daylight came this shape would still be there. It’d look odd under daylight (which was kind of the point, for him), in part because the shadows weren’t at all where the sun would make them.
Very cool. Thanks.
Very cool. (heh) I’ve never seen them so delicate… whole buildings, sure, but not tree limbs.