Susquehanna Panorama, February 5, 2009

Composite of five images taken 4:10 - 4:12 PM,
Thursday, Feb 5, 2009, Nanticoke-West Nanticoke Bridge
Click on picture for much larger image.

You know those signs that say "BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD SURFACE"? So do people standing on the bridges. Damn, it was cold up there.

Still, it was worth it. There was ice on the river, some ice, at least, covering almost exactly half the river, extending from the Northern shore. This meant I would be able to get the shadow of the bridge on the ice. As a bonus, I also got cool reflections of the trees in the water.

But, damn, it was cold.

That's Plymouth Mountain to the left, and the Nanticoke Flats to the right. In the distance the John S. Fine Bridge carries Route 29 traffic over the Susquehanna.

Panoramic pictures are pains to create. I used to think it was just me, trying to freehand these things, never getting them to line up exactly right, never getting the colors just right. But it wasn't me. I had the same problems using the tripod. I had to selectively erase large chunks of the overlapping images to get things to line up, or at least to obscure the mismatches. Ditto on the color, though there's at least one point where the colors simply didn't match. I can see it, plain as day.

This panorama covers about 150 degrees. Maybe more. Note the railing on either side of the image.

The ice in the river was incredibly cool, great folded and cracked and refrozen rafts of ice that made me think of Enceladus. Note the color of the shadows in both of these images: not black, not gray, but blue. The color of the sky, illuminating the shadowed regions and reflecting back at the observer. Maybe tomorrow I'll get a picture of what happens to shadows on snow at sunset!