"Anticrepuscular Rays"

Some of you may recall that one evening during the race we saw some beautiful rays of light coming up into the sky from the setting sun.  (The photo is actually of a similar very pretty sunset taken during the delivery.)

But the really interesting thing about the sunset we saw during the race was that there were similar rays of light coming up from the horizion in the opposite direction (away from the sun).

This is hard to see in the photo, but it was perfectly clear with the naked eye. I said that I would submit it to the Q & A section of the "New Scientist" (a popular science magazine that I get), but I've been dragging my feet and probably would never have gotten around to doing it.


However, just by accident I came across the explanation in an old APOD.
As you know, “Chance favors the prepared mind”—Louis Pasteur.
So check it out.

What we saw were "Anticrepuscular Rays"

I had similar good fortune in 2007 when we saw a white rainbow. Not too much later the explanation showed up in an APOD.

Cirrusblog Analytics - The Final Count

by Ulli

what does Google tell us about the visitors to our blog, how many? from where? and what were they looking at? I did a first assessment here, and now that the number of visitors is down to a trickle of around a dozen per day, I'll give the final overview:

Since a few days into the delivery up to now we got some 20,000 pageviews on the blog, from 2528 "Absolute Unique Visitors" (Google terminology), coming from all over the world, most from the USA - dominated by CA, followed by HI - then from Germany ;-)) , Canada, Portugal, and 44 more countries.

The most looked-up page was our "Crews" page with 536 pageviews. Which makes me feel guilty, as I probably have not included all of the folks who should have been mentioned under the Support heading. Anyone, give me a hint, and I will complete the page - you can reach me by email via the "Contact us" tab of the blog!

Pageviews peaked at 1635 on July 15, with overall total of over 20200:

Visitors peaked at 441 on July 15, with overall total of over 2500:

Duh, nobody from Greenland? And China? Africa?

Let me see: 4 states of the US did not visit the blog, but 48 regions, incl. Wash.DC, did? That sums up to 52. ... 52? Has something happened while we were out at sea?

Quite a few places in CA participated:

and a busy crowd on Oahu,HI:

... and finally Germany. I have no idea who was watching in all those places:

More video

now from ashore I have plenty of bandwidth and can afford to send videos without going through all the compression hoopla. Here is the footage we took on the boat; a total of 55 MByte, which we had snippled and shrunk to a mere 75KByte, an almost 1000 fold reduction. Too bad all this effort initially did not result in a result.

Watch the full video - you will find that we worked hard. And watch the confusion in our mind, while we were hard working to produce a completely spontaneous  work of art. I think it qualifies for some of the TV shows, where they show all these amateur videos, where something had gone wrong. Here we go:

Finally - we have the Halfway-Video up and running!

So, here is it, exactly as we had prepared it on the boat, and sent to
the blog exactly as we did during the race, same file, same format, same
everything, no changes whatsoever - except that it now was send from a
Linux computer. Ulli

Guten Tag !

see, this is the problem: you are away from the islands for a few days, and you already forget a decent greeting, like Aloha!

While Bill is busy cleaning up the left-over triple-S (shoes, socks, and shirts), I have my own clean-ups to do, like videos, and blog stats. It will come real soon, I promise.

Reading the after-race blog posts, I sometimes felt like reading the confessions given at a meeting of the "Anonymous Sailoholics". Amazing how despite this mix of people there is always a happy ending on every passage on Cirrus!

Only a few people are still looking at the blog, as i will show you shortly, but I have no idea who these hardcore Cirrutistas might be.

Ulli