2021 NH Spring/SH Fall Photo Thread (spoilers please!)

Found this really creepy witchcraft ritual shit


Treehouse


Slight view of the river and city center. The lingonberry shrubbery seemed extremely vibrantly green to my eyes. A welcome sight.


Nice-lighting-in-the-woods-porn-compilation

Live oaks


Pawpaw flower


Brasenia schreberi (Watershield), one of the southernmost occurences of this aquatic plant species


Trail down by the Savannas marsh


Really nice basin marsh filled with water-lilies and rushes




Trail through cattails


Bidens laevis (bur-marigolds/beggarticks)


Quercus inopina, a scrub oak endemic to Florida


Trail through scrub


Gopher apple flowers

Leaves are pretty much non-existant. Lots of big buds though, and tons of flowers.


It's difficult to see in the image, but there are some wild red tulips in the right of the image.


Buds large/open enough for some trees to look visibly different in color from afar now.



Snow can still be found, though only in shady or otherwise heavily sheltered areas.


Very variable weather the last week. Pretty much every single day has been 7-8'C highs with lots of cumulus clouds and snow showers (during 6-8'C temps)


Sat quite a while on that dead tree waiting for a bit of sun to make the photo prettier. Sun decided to go behind a particularly large cloud and eventually I gave up.


Found this little area by a creek.


Wild elderflower leafing out.


Nettles starting to pop out. No idea if that mushroom has grown up this spring or if it's simply been there throughout the entire winter. Mushrooms are normally a late summer and fall thing.


A different creek.


Previous images were on the western side of town. These following images are on the eastern side, on biggest intracity island, named The Island. Nice mix of evergreen and deciduous forest lol


"Thank you for caring for our school forest"


Sweet little glade


The beavers have no chill


Downtown


Art campus


Spindly trees


Weird growth on this aspen leaf


Nice hole 😳😬😏🥴🤤🥵😩


White beaches of Umeå


Oh no, someone dropped their sausages while stick-grilling 😩


Riverside Panorama. Notice the very blatant snow showers coming off a few of the clouds.


Lots of mud


These pines seemed unusually green to me


This "health/healing spring/well" doesn't look very healthy to me.


Surprising amount of snow in this particular spot of the forest.


View from the bridge from The Island


That suburban-looking borough seen in the right of this image is an area I really like. Cozy there.


Now vs a couple months ago



Also went outdoors for a bit yesterday. I randomly entered a tall apartment building near the top of the city hill-forest to see if it was possible to get any sort of view from the stairwell.


I don't think this is a very effective location for a windmill.


And obviously no Babalbum is complete without a sunset from my scaffolded balcony.

I mean these are obviously leaves, right? They're just very small.


Most are still more buddish than leafish


Largest field in Sweden north of 60'N (this is obviously only a very limited part of the "field agglomeration" or whatever you could call it.



Some parts turning green (the grass that is, not the trees obviously). Also, I always compress the images to 2000 maximum pixel width before uploading here, so it's hard to see, but there are two specks in the center of the frame that are two roe deer.


I found the official sun recorder for Umeå. Seems it's got two separate sun recorders, a temperature station as well some form of sky observer. Very thorough! So basically if one is acting irregular, they've got the other one, and if both are acting irregular they can check to see if the temperature changed rapidly (due to sunlight) and what the sky looked like.


Its precise location:


An easy misconception to make about sun stations is to assume that it's most important to have clear sight to the south since the sun spends the most amount of time in that direction. This assumption is false however, because the sun will always be the highest when it's in the south. It's to the west, east, and especially for northern stations in the summer, to the north, that it's most important to not have obstructions. For an object to obstruct the horizon by 2 degrees, it needs protrude less than 1 meter for every 28 meters (1/tan2deg). I calculated that the sun recorder is roughly 9.5m above the ground (using the door as a reference which tends to be 2m as standard). Using the image with the speed sign I saw that the trees immediately behind the station (from the point where the picture was taken) seemed to be about twice as tall as the sun recorder (the trees' shadows are more than twice as long when measured via satellite images), so let's say it protrudes 9m.
(Zoomed in image showing the trees behind the sun station)

Using satellite measuring tools, I found they were 190m away, which gives an angle of about 2.74 degrees of horizon obstruction about 45 degrees NE. Today the sun rises 48deg NE, and judging from images, it looks like the horizon obstruction is about the same all the way until at least 70deg ENE. Today, 41 minutes is spent below 3 degrees in at sunrise, all within the calculated angles. Yesterday was completely cloud-free and recorded exactly 20.2 minutes of sunlight between 04.00 and 05.00. Sunrise was 04.00, and the time at which the sun had risen above 2.74 degrees was 04.38. Whether it's because of these obstructions that the sun recorder didn't start recording until 04.39, or if it was because a sun recorder simply needs the sun to be at least 2.8 degrees above the ground, isn't clear. The sunset on the 4th was 21.10 (311 deg NW). Assuming the same tree height, that would mean a 4.0 degree horizon obstruction), and 42.6 minutes of sunshine was recorded after 20.00. At 20.43 the sun angle was 1.9 deg, at 305deg NW. At that particular angle, there was a clearing in the NW woods (closest trees about 290m away, or 1.8 degrees above the ground, assuming they're the same 18m height). At 302deg there are trees 160m away, (or 3.2deg above the horizon using the same tree height). At 302deg the sun was 3.4 deg above the horizon though, so it shouldn't have been obstructed. It's hard to draw too many conclusions about this. It seems the sun stopped recording at 2.8 deg at sunrise, and 1.9 deg at sunset, it's possible that this discrepancy could be due to variations in atmospheric conditions. However, they are also extremely in-line with my calculations of horizon obstruction. Anyway, most sun stations in the world have some form of obstruction 2 degrees above the horizon, so I wouldn't say that ours is gives an unfair disadvantage. The time spent close to the horizon is significantly longer the further north you get though.
Edit: I took a look at some midwinter values, and on the 4th of January, the sun recorder started recording at 09.52, 30 min after sunrise, at a 1.1deg sun elevation. Conveniently (?) it started recording sunshine within a minute from leaving the line of sight of a very nearby (deciduous) tree. It recorded at a 1.1deg angle then at least. Then it stopped recording sunlight at 13.44, 22 minutes before sunset, at a 0.8deg sun elevation. In that direction my calculations say that the forest 3km away would stick up about 0.7deg above the horizon. This lends a lot of credibility to my way of estimating and calculating horizon obstruction, as well as the loss of sun hours near sunrise/set being due to horizon obstruction rather than lack of sun strength at low sun angles.

Edit 2: I forgot that the true horizon is 1.6 degrees below a perfect horizontal line. If an object is the exact same height as the bottom of your pupil, it will still block the horizon. It needs to be 1.6 degrees shorter  than the observer (the curvature of the earth counts towards apparent elevation lowering, i.e. a treetop that exactly touches the horizon is 0m in apparent height). This means that all my calculations for horizon obstruction caused by relatively near objects have been underestimated. Things near the sun recorder need to be proportionally shorter in comparison than things far away in order to not obstruct the horizon. So if a sun recorder is placed at exactly 10m height, then a rooftop that's 10m tall and 10m away will still obscure the horizon by nearly 1.6 degrees. For very short distances, an object needs to be about 2.7cm shorter for every meter away from the observer. I.e. the rooftop would have to be about 9.73m to not obscure the horizon if it's 10m away.

Anyway, let's move on with the pics. This one is nice.


More roe deer. Decent horns on the male (can't tell in the image)


Had an evening snack with a friend in a glade on a completely different side of town. Looked nice though.


And here's some more shots from yesterday. Mostly "nice-lighting-in-forest-porn"


If colors appear more muted than in the day before, it's because the sky was hazy underneath thin cirrostratus clouds.



I sat here for a couple of hours, chatting in the shoutbox, being comfortable in the 8'C and kinda-sunny weather, with the woods protecting me from the rather moderate winds.


Some birch trees (or saplings I guess in this case) have started opening up their leaf buds slightly.


Similar story with the blueberry shrubbery. They look very close to bursting.


After being comfortable and warm, sitting there for a couple of hours, all of a sudden I started getting really cold really quickly. I didn't notice the wind picking up where I was sitting, and looking at weather stations there didn't seem to be any significant change in temp/wind conditions.

More moody forest pics




We have had some very significant storms the last couple of winter half-years. Lots of casualties.




Surprised to see snow in this particular spot since it's not shaded nor particularly sheltered.



Found this bush of who knows what species (don't think it's a typical regional species) with quite a few leaves


Made me think of jetshnl who thought it was strange to see verdant leaves with residual snow still on the ground, as that bush was less than a meter from some pretty large snow piles (the bush is in the center of the image, in the background)


And then a final moody forest pic for good measure.