Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

This is now the third time in four years that we've had crappy air quality (~160) from wildfires burning all over Canada. Outside, everything had a sort of yellow haze to it (sort of similar to a sepia-tone photo), the sky was a flat yellow/gray color, and I felt irritation in my throat and lungs (different than the previous years). I wanted to take some pictures of the yellow glow.

I took one inside and it was hard to see. I went outside and it just looked like a gray sky or some of the cloudless areas looked blue-ish in the camera. Then I looked up and noticed a small little orange circle in the sky.

It was the sun.

I took a picture with my wide angle lens that was on my camera and that was useless. So I swapped it for a telephoto lens. I used the LCD screen on my camera to target the sun, and then switched back to the normal mode, tried to avoid moving the camera, and took a few pictures—without looking through the lens via the viewfinder. The clouds and smoke particles served as a partial filter, but I didn't want to risk staring at the sun through the lens.

When I zoomed in, I noticed I could see at least 2 sunspots in the picture! Here's the full-size image of the sun with sunspots. The more vague differences in the coloring or shading are likely from the clouds. Shortly after I took it, parts of the sun were obscurred by clouds

Here's another picture without color and exposure adjustment zoomed out a little to include some leaves from the top of a tree as a reference. It's more what the sky looked like to me. It was both interesting and kind of freaky to see. We didn't use to get these summer smoke storms.

I guess this is the new ”tradition“ for us now…