Nine Eleven

I totally forgot I had this post waiting in the wings. I loaded the pictures last Sunday night and then thought I'd write about them on Monday. Oops. Well, a week late, here they are. It was quite a dramatic sky on 9-11 and as I drove to pick up a friend to go waste some time at Target, I came upon this site of the flag at half-mast at sunset.

For those of you who know Houston, that's the AIG building. Well, I guess it's not AIG anymore since they're trying to totally change their image since we were forced to bail their greedy, irresponsible butts out of trouble. I still think we shoulda let all those companies fail.

As we were coming out of Target, we noticed this plane's contrail high up in the sky. At first it started out looking like an "S", but as the plane kept flying, it completed one circle and then another. The fun part was we weren't the only ones in the parking lot staring up at the sky and even taking pictures.



You can just see the first loop starting to dissipate as the plane makes it's way into the second loop. When I got home later that evening, I went to the Ch. 11 news website and discovered it was a experimental NASA plane that had been taking air samples at 40,000 and 50,000 feet. Apparently quite a few people were upset and nervous at the sight of an unknown plane circling the city on 9-11. A NASA spokesperson said they had been doing it all week and that the humidity that particular day was high enough for the contrails to form and us to finally notice.

And just a parting shot of one of the happiest places on earth in the setting sun. It was much more dramatic in person. I think I realized part of my facination with roiling skies at sunset... it's as close to terrain and topography as we have here in southeast Texas. Man I miss the mountains.