Susquehanna and the Moon, January 27, 2010

Storms charged up the East Coast this weekend. Locally we were spared the worst, and fared much better than other areas affected by the same system. But the Susquehanna River, which slices through Northeastern Pennsylvania on its trip to join the West Branch and head south through Harrisburg and into the Chesapeake Bay, is fed by waters from upstate New York as well as nearer tributaries. This means that the level of the Susquehanna is determined not just by local weather events, but also by weather hundreds of miles away.

I drove over the Susquehanna around midday today on a box girder bridge near West Pittston. It's an old bridge, quite narrow, and its replacement is being slowly constructed alongside it. So it was a little terrifying to see just how fast and high the river was there. I decided to go out and get some pictures from the Nanticoke - West Nanticoke bridge when I was done doing what I needed to do for the day.

The river was clearly higher here than it was when I took photos last February 5th. (See here and here for those pictures.) But it wasn't as high as I expected. I parked my car in a dirt lot full of small, old, beaten-up and mostly foreign vehicles, so it sort of blended in. I took this picture from the riverbank, before I began crossing the bridge:


One of the most obvious signs that the water was higher than usual were the trees that seemed to be standing on a narrow island in the river. In fact, these are the trees that line the coast of the Nanticoke Flats, which were now almost completely inundated. (Se the Google Earth photo at the bottom of this entry to see what the flats look like from above when the river is well below flood stage. The flats are the large treeless area in the lower middle of the photo.)





You can use the green building on the left side of this photo, and the white tree in front of it, as landmarks to compare the level of the river with the level in the large panorama featured at the top of this post.

Taking pictures facing west across the deck of a well-travelled bridge and over a river in the afternoon rarely produces satisfactory results, but I liked the composition of this one. The railroad bridge in the distance is no longer used, and the rail lines have long been rerouted along the southern bank of the river.

While I was stepping back from taking this photo the right pocket of my coat snagged on the left handlebar of a bicyclist who had silently chosen that moment to pass behind me. Neither one of us wound up plummeting over the railing and into the cold, cold water of the Susquehanna.

The Moon plays peekaboo among the clouds in the eastern sky as I walk back to the car.

I turned back to get a photo of the bridge I had just been on.

As I got to my car I stopped to take one last picture of the bridge with some of the old cars in the foreground. Somewhere there is someone who would be willing to pay a small fortune for any one of these vehicles.


BONUS: When I got home I decided to snap a few photos of the Moon - freehand, using only my body and then the roof of my car to steady the camera.



Here's a "stacked" image that combined three individual photos in an effort to remove artifacts present in any one. I'm not sure if my ham-handed stacking made the image better or worse. Still, some genuine detail is visible, including Mare Crisium at the top.