The beach was absolutely deserted when I arrived (not counting the gatekeeper who dutifully collected $6 for parking), which made sense — it had been a cold, rainy day in November, and it was almost sunset besides. The sand was all wet, covered with tiny little pockmarks from the rain.

Rain was still falling in Santa Monica to the north and somewhere inland in the South Bay — possibly Torrance or Redondo Beach. Lit from the side, Santa Monica looked like there was a golden haze above the city.

It was clear enough that I could see the silhouette of Catalina Island off in the distance to the south (though I didn’t get any good photos of it). I was surprised at how much more I could see from the beach than from my office window, only a couple of miles inland. (I have to remember: LAX is huge.)

As the sun dipped below the horizon, it lit up a column of clouds red from below. Even afterward, it lit up the edges of distant clouds just barely visible peeking over the horizon.

The rain started up again as I left, getting stronger as I drove inland. By the time I got home, I was ready to use an umbrella just walking from the garage to the front door. About a minute later, it really opened up, and I made the mistake of going out to check the mail. Instant soak.

Full photo set (8) at Flickr.

This was the view that surprised me the most: Bright orange (a little more magenta in real life than it looks here in the photo) on the underside of the clouds, but plain gray on the sides.

Here are a couple of views of the rainbow and Downtown Los Angeles in the distance, a little bit earlier.

Looking northwest across LAX toward the Santa Monica Mountains. The sun is out of frame to the left. Oh, who am I kidding? It was behind a building, so I aimed at what I could see.

More photos: LA post-storm rainbow & sunset

On my drive to work this morning, a gap in the clouds left this amazing view of the San Gabriels covered in snow from the last week’s worth of storms, lit up by the rising sun. By the time I made it up to Los Angeles, clouds had blocked the view, and I didn’t see any mountains for the rest of the day.

The view when I stepped out of the office last Thursday night. Not retouched at all except for cropping.

• Incredible photo from APOD: Clouds, Birds, Moon, Venus. I’ve finally replaced my Woodbridge Snow photo as my desktop wallpaper at home.
• Gender-swapped Scott Pilgrim cast at Project Rooftop by Jemma Salume.
• Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, Amazon is offering incredible deals on the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels — less than $5 per book! You can pick up the whole series for under $30! (via Comics Worth Reading)
• Microsoft provides an interesting look back at the evolution of the Internet Explorer logo over the past fifteen (yes, fifteen) years.
• 100-year data preservation. A 350-year-old copy of Shakespeare is still readable. But what about that 35-year-old floppy disk?
• Funny: Swedish voters submit SQL injection and JavaScript attacks on hand-written ballot. The article’s title refers back to the XKCD comic about “Bobby Tables.” (via Slashdot)
• [Edit: One more.] Flickr gives me yet another reason — uploading in Android 2.2 — to upgrade to a Vibrant or G2 once the dust settles here.

Windows 7 is doing what Vista couldn’t: convincing people to replace Windows XP. The best quote in this ZDNet article: “Windows 7 is the Anti-Vista.”

The Straight Dope experiments with Kahlua cupcakes to determine two questions: How much alcohol is left in each cupcake? (Not much) Can you get drunk? (Not unless you eat so many cupcakes that you’ll be sick anyway.)

Some comics fan art. First, a realistic Darkwing Duck by Mike P. Mitchell. I suspect that if someone other than Disney owned the character, we’d be seeing a “live-action” movie that looked like this. Second, Comics Alliance collects a fantastic series of cover art for Great Comics That Never Happened – team-ups like the Justice League and the Wu-Tang Clan, or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featuring 1980s icons like Mr. T, Doc Brown and MacGyver, or Hannah Zatanna, torn between the worlds of superheroes and magic, or a race between Superman, the Flash…and the Dukes of Hazzard.

I saw this amazing circumhorizon arc around 1:30 this afternoon. I had just crossed the street while walking to lunch when I looked up, saw it…and walked back to the office to get my camera!

Lesson learned: always bring the camera!*

It started out as just a couple of small segments, but as the clouds drifted into position it quickly grew, and at its strongest it was just long enough to fill the field of view on my camera. There were also a couple of fragments of a 22° circular halo visible at the time.

The whole thing had vanished by 1:50, as the clouds drifted out of alignment, though I did see a more complete circular halo later on.

It looks like a sort of straightened-out rainbow, but it’s actually caused by ice crystals. If the right type of crystals cover the entire sky, this will actually stretch in a circle all the way around the sky, parallel to the horizon.

They’re a lot less common than the 22-degree halos. I’ve seen and photographed a ton of those over just a few years, but this is maybe the second time I’ve seen something like this. Fourth if you count the two feathery fragments I’ve seen.

At times like this, I really wish I had a DSLR, but the point-and-shoot will do in a pinch.

*On the other hand, when I went back, I pointed it out to a couple of people at the office who are into photography, since it was visible through the windows on one side of the building. One of my co-workers has a digital SLR and carries it with him, so he went outside and got some great shots. If I hadn’t taken a late lunch and chosen to walk anyway and been in the habit of looking for halos and forgotten to bring my camera, chances are no one in the office would have seen it.

Update (May 17): I just discovered that there are people who think these clouds are connected to earthquakes. No, they aren’t. They’re caused by ice crystals refracting sunlight, just like most halos, and have been seen in many places that didn’t have earthquakes.

When I stopped to take a picture, I realized that there was a whole line of little puffball clouds, tracking the mountain range exactly, but not appearing anywhere else in the sky. It really shows the effect that mountains have on cloud formation!

I decided to try for a four-shot panorama of the whole range.

It came out better than I expected, actually. I believe this is the first time I’ve stitched together a panorama using phone pictures. I used Hugin, which was a little hampered by the fact that I couldn’t find specs on the G1 lens type, focal length, etc., but it seems to have done reasonably well.

While driving around lunchtime, I saw an airplane pass overhead, its contrail casting a shadow on the thin cloud layer below. I had my camera handy, and was stopped at an intersection, so I snapped a couple of shots. As often seems to happen, the first, haphazard one was the best.

The diagonal line extending down from the sun is, I believe, a sun pillar-like effect in the trails left by the windshield wipers. Also: Unless I’m mistaken, you can just barely see the edge of a halo in the feathery clouds at bottom center. It’s the slight reddening.

A few hours earlier, I saw this:

I glanced out the window while changing lanes on the freeway this morning & noticed the bottom edge of this halo. By the time I had a chance to stop the car and really look, the lower arc seemed to have disappeared, but the left side was sharply visible – as was a sundog. I rolled down the window and snapped a couple of photos while waiting for the light to change. Unfortunately, I couldn’t position anything to block the sun, so the exposure isn’t all that great.

By the time I reached my destination and parked, it had all faded except for a slightly bright patch in the clouds to the left.

I stepped out of the office building tonight and felt like I’d stepped into a Maxfield Parrish painting. The whole sky looked like this. (Or at least the half that was visible.) It literally stopped me in my tracks.

I spent the next 15 minutes walking around the parking lot, watching the lighting on the clouds change as the sun set, and taking pictures.