that's 1 book I would love to have, I'm going to do a search for it now

im a serchin but I just cant seem to find many places that sell it for under $170, if you could grant, point me in the right direction for a hundred bux copy mate, where do I go?

G'Day Aztech,

I purchased mine direct from the WMO's website. Search the catalogue for number 407 - ensure you select volume II (plates).

To order simply click the shopping basket icon then fill out the form which opens up. In a day or two the WMO will send you an invoice. After it's paid your order should be sent. I emailed the WMO after I paid but never got a reply, then the book turned up.

Hope that helps,
Grant

Any guesses as to this cloud? or is it an aurora?

http://englishrussia.com/?p=2827#more-2827

it looks like a noctilucent cloud, I dunno about the fast moving that the woman is describing, meybe a meteor???


thanks Grant Im on the case now :cheers:

A long time ago back in the late 1950's at the very beginning of the space age, the British launched a number of sounding rockets to some hundreds of thousands of feet from the then very new Woomera rocket launching facilities.
It was in around mid March to mid April when some of these launches took place.
A number of these launches released, I think, 2 or 3 of a series of sodium clouds on their trajectory upwards.
I was in my late teens at the time and we were working out in the paddocks north of Horsham in western Victoria until after dark.
I remember very well watching in the cool clear night air, the large expanding glowing clouds on the far north western horizion and we all watched in awe as those clouds appeared one above the other as the rocket climbed into the stratosphere.
At the time of course we did not directly know that it was the british testing rockets in the SA desert but there had been quite some publicity that the british were going to do this and even a couple of articles on the release of sodium gas to study the high stratosphere so I guessed at the time that it was the experimental rocket launches.
Yes, as a teenager I knew a lot about rockets and the proposed space stations and the British Interplanetary Society's plan to put man on the Moon by 1998 in those days.

When I look at those Russian photos it reminded me very much of those vaporous clouds all that time long gone of some 50 years ago.

My guess is that a test launch of a liquid fueled rocket from a base some distance outside of Moscow has gone badly wrong and the controllers have lost control of the missile.
The missile has started to disintegrate first with a splitting of the fuel tanks which has released vast quantities of fuel into the high atmosphere where it has rapidly dispersed.
The main body of the missile which is travelling from right to left has continued on for some time with the whole missile aflame until it finally runs out of fuel totally and just disintegrates or just becomes a dead piece of machinery hurtling down to earth.

The explosion was quite high in the atmosphere as stratus cloud can be seen in the foreground in front of the large vapour release and this also possibly indicates that the missile was quite high in the atmosphere and possibly even into the lower stratosphere and therefore a long distance away.
The speed mentioned also indicates that it will be a missile that has reached it's launch velocity of some thousands of kilometres per hour but is a long distance away.

My guess so make of it what you will!

Sounds like a fair old guess to me. My first thought was something was leaving a vapour trail. One local guess

"These are traces left by the launch of Soyuz rocket with Meridian satellite".

So Im off to look at launch schedules.

I was wrong in one respect, Leo.
The rocket if that is what it is, was actually travelling from left to right , not the other way around as I first suggested.
Another look at the RH end of the phenomena in the photos, against the background buildings, shows it rapidly moving to the right.

It looks like the rocket caught fire and then started to disintegrate, blasting it's fuel high into the stratosphere until it finally ran out of fuel and a small [?] explosion resulted right on the RH end of the big fuel vapour release.

The photos were taken at 2 AM but assuming that they were taken quite recently, the sun at this time of the year would be quite close to it's northernmost point and would be shining for a very long periods each day in the highest levels of the atmosphere in the northern regions similar to Moscow's latitude.
Even at 2 am, in the northern regions, this would lighten the vapour cloud which would be quite visible at very high altitudes.

Don't know if you will find any info on the launch as it could quite easily be a military test launch and the details would not be in the public domain.
All very interesting stuff and thanks for the link.

Arianespace Launches Russian Satellite on Soyuz
May 25, 2009 | Satellite Today | Staff Writer
[Satellite Today 05-25-09] Arianespace successfully launched a Soyuz rocket carrying a Russian governmental satellite, the company announced May 22.
Arianespace said that the satellite was accurately placed on the target orbit.
The successful launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia took place at 1:53 local Moscow time on May 21 and was the fifth Soyuz family mission in 2009 for Arianespace.

So it is beginning to come together. Now I spose the plan is to find it on Jtrack or similar.

"
“At 2.00am we went to walk our friends over, and then has seen THIS. It was moving with the speed of the plane so I didn’t have enough time to get the holder to make more clear shots.”, writes the lady who made the photos."

So 7 minutes after lift off, they went outside. Obviously clearly visible then, so no more than a few minutes after launch. Need someone good at maths to work out some details.

Should be able to find the launch site on google earth.

One thing I know, with your background, my money is on you!

Im glad you enjoyed thses pics. Its not a bad site really, one of the best for interesting pics, minus the porn. Check out the weather pics when you get a chance.

The photos don't show any dates but do state that a "few" days ago so the exact date of the photos is unknown unless you can find some evidence of the date on the photos.
Plesetsk Cosmodrome is located some 800 kms north of Moscow on the rail line to Arkhangel'sk.
From my experience on at least 2 or 3 occasions watching those incredible clouds that were chemicals released from the rocket on it's climb all those years ago, the distance to Woomera of 770 kms from Horsham is almost the same as to Plesetsk at 800 kms north of Moscow so to see this phenomena in the right conditions from my experience, is no real problem.
And I would assume that this launch, if it is a rocket malfunction as I have guessed, did take place from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
Baikonur Cosmodrome some 2000 kms SE of Moscow is beyond any visual range for anything like this.
The only other launch site where a malfunction of this spectacular type that could be seen from Moscow is Kapustin Yar, south of Volvograd [ Stalingrad ] on the Volga river.
However the light at the lower latitudes would not have been suitable to show up the vapour cloud due to the sun position compared to the near continuous daylight up near the Arctic Sea at this time of the year.

My brother and I did a small experiment many years ago and found that in clear nightime conditions, we could see lightning in the tops of thunderheads from 400 kms away so a rocket malfunction on this scale, a few tens of kilometres into the atmosphere would be no real problem to be seen over an 800 km distance on a clear night.

From memory, even the elevation of that enormous vapour cloud is similar to the lowest cloud of chemicals released by the British rocket.
I seriously doubt that this phenomena had anything to do with Arianspace / Soyuz launch
And in fact that whole press release is puzzling as Arianspace is the European satellite launching organisation who in this case have apparently launched a Russian satellite on a Russian rocket from a formerly secret Russian launch facility.
Something does not add up there even though I have read the press release on Satellite Today.

Not directly related;
Russian Space Web.com says that the Soyuz FG rocket lifted off on May 27th for the Space station at 14; 34 ; 53 Moscow time for the ISS which is a half an hour after the supposed time of those photos.
Furthermore, Baikonur is a couple of thousand kilometres SE of Moscow and it would not be possible to see any launches that went wrong from Moscow.
Russian space launches for manned flight are always done from the Baikonur aka Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the major old soviet and Russian Republic civilian launch facilities which since the break up of the Soviet Union is now in Kazakh Republic.
The advantage of Baikonur is that as it is closer to the equator the speed of the Earth's rotation towards the east, the launch direction across the steppes, is added to the rockets velocity and allows much heavier payloads to reach an orbital velocity for the same fuel load.
Plesetsk being up near the Arctic circle doesn't have this advantage and is used primarily by the military for research and satellite launches particularly polar orbiting satellites which can cover the entire globe every 24 hours as the earth rotates under the satellite orbit.

The Russians were considering abandoning Baikonur as it was no longer on Russian soil and were proposing to build new civilian launch facilities at Svododnyy in the Russian far east.
However I think that the Russians and the Kazakhs came to an agreement a few years ago which enabled the Russians to use and control Baikonur for a long time into the future.

All in all I will stick to the theory that a liquid fuelled military launch vechile, possibly in tests or even in a practice launch with a now obsolete liquid fuelled launch vechile was launched possibly from Plesetsk, went AWOL and the controllers lost control.
The launch vechile started to break up and released it's fuel load high into the stratosphere or even higher and the rocket then ran out of fuel and from the appearance of the very RH end of the vapour cloud appears to have blown up.

I am no expert at all on the rockets nowadays and have only used what I can find on the net plus some background knowledge and the rest is deduction so I could be very wrong.
If so then I will be most interested in any alternative explanations that have a good grounding in fact.

Yes the Soyuz looks more likely based on the dates supplied, multiplied by guesswork.

Im stuck on dial up for a coupla days, so will look more next week. In the meantime, there are a few Jouornos I can email to see if they know anything.

This in an email from Bill Harwood, CBS News Space Analyst Kennedy Space Center, FL who was kind enough to reply to me.

"If you can find a date and time, I can find out if there were any
launches that could explain the pictures. I've seen views like that
before, when a rocket stage vents propellant and, in a few cases, when
a satellite released a chemical as part of an atmospheric study. I've
never seen one as large as the one in the pictures you sent, but
that's what they look like in general. My guess is this was some sort
of venting from a rocket stage in orbit. But that's just a guess."

Kinda makes sense, plume of gas on the right, remains of a stage on the left, with one close up of a rocket disappearing in the distance.

Lord Gladstone alias Skysthelimit posted this message and photo into a South Australian thread on "July 08, 2010 02:32 AM Re: South Australian and Adelaide day to day forecasting" page 1543:

{Quote} Well heres another pic I took which had me scratching my head. Heading to Port Pirie and climbing over the ranges today I noticed this large area of low fog? to the north of Pirie and in fact over the water. This was at 3.00pm and it had a real fluorescent glow to it. I've seen similar dirty smog layers trapped in this way. It looked a lot like smoke but no evidence of fires anywhere. confused {end quote}.

The water referred to is Spencers Gulf - a shallow sea gulf with industries in nearby Port Pirie, and also in Whyalla and Port Augusta further away but on the gulf. I'm reposting here in case anyone else recognises the causes of the trendy blue haze-fog-smog. I hope it's not radioactive whatever it is

Here's another pic of the same on the northern edge showing multiple layers.

I will have a bit of a go at this one Skythelimit but it is purely a lot of guesswork combined with a little background info I have picked up in my life.

1 / Stratified air would be needed for the layered appearance and seems to be the case here despite the Cumulous appearance of the clouds overhead which would normally indicate turbulence and mixing down to ground level.
Note also the high level cirrus and stratus cloud.
You will also note that the convection type clouds [ which may be Alto Cu. Alto Cu which do not have any connection to any ground convection but generally start in an unstable layer above an upper inversion ] appear to have a boundary edge some distance away.

This quite possibly indicates that due to cool local air conditions over the shallow local sea area that convection has not happened there yet which could account for the stratification and the layers.

You say this effect has occurred over the water, very saline water with few temperature contrasts.
Temperature contrasts on the small scale normally start convection so in this case, few or very small temperature contrasts over the sea water and so little or no convection and a low level stratified atmosphere.
Plus lots of interesting natural chemical salts and etc in those shallow gulf waters and that helps a lot.

As a pilot and particularly as an old glider pilot, we always see a dark band right under up to the atmospheric inversion level when viewed at a few kilometres distance and in fact it is a very good indicator that the convection will stop at that height.
The dark layer is made up of an accumulation of assorted very fine particles of dust, smoke, chemical smogs and all sorts of interesting stuff.

The inversion detritus is so thin that it is impossible to see it close up.
You need to be close to the inversion level and need some viewing depth through the dispersed smog and dust as in a few kilometres into the distance to pick this very dispersed layer of smog / dust and etc up.
Unless it is smoke from a large fire and in fact you will usually see smoke from a stubble burn or a large fire climb up until it hits the atmospheric temperature inversion, flattens out and and then it drifts off down wind at that upper level.

So a very dispersed layer of some dust and smog sized particles under a very low level inversion over the shallow and saline smooth sea surface is highly likely in this case.

2 / The blue green colour is the most puzzling aspect.

Now solar UV can be a real problem for sunburn on light skinned persons on high level stratus cloud type days when the sunlight is diffused and it would appear that there are no chances of sunburn but you finish up getting very badly sun burnt on such high overcast days. [ bad personal experience a number of times as a small boy at the beach, sadly in times long gone! ]

There is a considerable amount of hydrated calcium sulphate otherwise known as gypsum up around that part of the northern gulf including possibly a considerable amount in the very shallow northern gulf waters.
Now gypsum fluoresces under UV light in about that colour as shown in this Mineral UV Fluorescence Table
It would only need small amounts of wind blown gypsum from inland and from wind effects on the sea surface and trapped under a low level inversion to create a layered appearance as we see in the photos.

So my guess is that atmospheric and sea surface conditions have created the right conditions for a low level stratified inversion to temporarily exist over the sea and the fine dispersible gypsum dusts and minor amounts of a couple of other minerals to be found in that area in the form of very fine dispersible dust particles have got trapped under this low inversion.
Some local high level stratus cloud,[ not the Cumulous ] is filtering the solar spectrum to some extent but allowing the UV spectrum to get through and due to the highly dispersed but very fine, mainly gypsum dusts [ and also including minor amounts of other mineral dust particles] are fluorescing under the solar UV in the blue / green band providing a quite extraordinary and obviously very rare phenomenon.

I would like to know if the locals have seen this before.

Any other opinions?

Hey there ROM, that's interesting reading. You've obviously put a lot of thought into this and its much appreciated. How right you are is anyone's guess but you've covered most bases.
I live forty odd kms over the Flinders Ranges to the east of Port Pirie. I've made the journey hundreds of times over these ranges in my lifetime but I dont recall ever seeing this phenomenum. As for locals, if they're not keen skywatchers like us weatherzoners they'd probably never notice. The two people in the car with me for example couldn't understand what I was on about! Thanks for your thoughts!

Posted by Skysthelimit in another thread Wednesday 18th April 2012 08:27 PM


"Lots of pirocumulus around the place. This one looking up my street." (Gladstone in the Mid-North of South Australia)
Hope you don't mind me copying this pic here Lord Gladstone

Some shots from the Ranges of the ACT and the adjoining Yass Plains. I won't and can't identify these cloud types but I do know that good looking clouds enhance the landscape.

I think the sign below means for suspicious looking people to walk this way ... to see beautiful and interesting clouds.

















Warren.

Warren - nice shots there.

The little walking men are the track markers for the Hume & Hovell Walking track that goes from Yass to Woomargama (maybe now through to Albury) It traverses a lot of high country down to (near) Tumbarumba and onwards. Spectacular walk I did years ago in winter - saw a bit of ice, frost and snow - magic walk.

Dave, G'day. I like the Hume and Hovell, the little graphic is a brilliant and charming design. I've done parts of the H&H walking track and the alternate cycle route(mostly). Following their original route from Lake George to Albury.

Some recent cloud shots on Hume and Hovell's original route, most shots were taken earlier this year, when it has been raining the proverbial cats and dogs.

From the Lake George Escarpment.





Crossing the Cullerin Range not far from where Humes Father's property was at Woolbidillah, on the Fish River a branch of the Lachlan.



On the Goodradigbee looking towards Wee Jasper Bridge.



Wee Jasper Mountain from Sugarloaf Mountain.



Goodradigbee Mountain where they descended to the Goodradigbee River from near Sugarloaf.



Warren.