Morning number 2 from Murray Hill. This morning got under my skin fast. I'd been up looking at crap since 9pm. Everywhere was colder than the same time the night before by 3 and 4 degrees. I thought I was set. I left at 3 a.m. again and knew I was screwed when there was barely any dew on my car. Pisgah was already down to their low the day before, so I figured it had to be good for fog out there. They wind up down to 51. You could see your breath up there. On the drive up I29 I noted it was certainly colder than the morning before, and way way colder than it was in Blair. Hell if I was seeing any fog though. There was just a smidge on the river as I crossed. I get to Murray Hill and walk up top again. To my surprise.....wind. A lot more wind than the previous morning. Every single ob I looked at before leaving was showing essentially zero wind. What else was surprising, it was rather warm up on there. It felt like Blair did when I left, low to mid-60s. The other surprise, low accas clouds running along the river, a few thousand feet off the ground. They weren't moving either. They had a very slow movement towards the east, while flow aloft was north or northeasterly. I made sure to look at water vapor and IR images before I left, and saw nothing. Any clouds can do a number on your lows. It can be neat to watch temps actually rising as an area of cirrus moves over. I was like, yay, wind and clouds....I'm screwed. I was cussing at those clouds and the wind. The scene up there was just very hazy, could hardly find any fog out there.

It sucked until those clouds I'd been curing moved in front of the moon, or the moon began to set behind them(since they were really barely moving anywhere). Now all the sudden you had these amazing moon rays dotting the fields below. This would have been completely amazing had there been a blanket of thick fog down there. That would be a rare shot! I mean think about it. You'd first need crops that help with moisture. You then need a cool night that isn't too dry, to get your fields to go crazy with fog. General thick fog doesn't work, since it is usually going to be taller than this hill(which is 300 feet above the valley floor). So it takes a special sort of crop fog from a cold moist night. I'm finding it very hard to get anything like I saw there last year. That was a rather solid blanket of fog. So it is hard to get that stuff just right to begin with. Then you'd have to have a near full moon at that angle in the sky, and have it be there towards morning when it coldest. Then yeah, you'd need a nice dotted accas cloud field! That'd be a horribly rare shot, and all I would have needed was to have that thick fog blanket, that should have been there! I think that breeze was the biggest killer, because it was certainly cold enough down there.

Again, this is all moon-lit under a longer type shutter, and ISO'd up some...to brighten things.

My uncle recently purchased a Rebel XSi and wanted to use it and see this hill, so he drove up. Two cars are actually in this one. He just barely missed the best moon ray ops. The sky began to lighten towards sunrise, sort of choking off the contrast the rays had with them.

That is still the moon, not the sun.

That is the sun. My camera screwed up as it broke the horizon. It was either the lens contact error or something with my lowering battery. It wouldn't even let me shut it off. It didn't go away until I changed the battery. Whichever it was would really suck if it happened while shooting a close tornado.

We decided to drive east towards this area I've always seen fog, viewed from Murray Hill anyway. I never thought we'd find a nice high spot to view it, if it was even worth a darn from close. Well we did and it was. If I'd only known of this spot sooner, since unlike areas west of Murray Hill, there was lots of fog in here. It had to be because the wind was less while being more in the hills. It was around 50 here in the morning. This would have been nice for the moon-lit fog scenes I wanted.

This will be a nice back up spot when the scene from Murray Hill doesn't pan out. I've driven to Murray Hill for nothing a few mornings now. Knowing about this spot would have been quite useful.