Fog Bank, August 19, 2013

My first pick this week is from ESPOD Circumhorizon Arc
http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2013/07/circumhorizon-arc-above-post-falls-idaho.html

Capital Weather Gang posted a set of nice pictures of mammatus clouds in the DC area, from Thursday, August 1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/02/stunning-mammatus-clouds-south-of-washington-d-c-thursday-evening/

back to ESPOD with Crepuscular rays,
http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2013/08/views-of-crepuscular-rays.html

Mike Moss sent a link from the Capital Weather Gang, with another good story of lightning sprites.
I think he sent this to Nate, too.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/13/sprites-rare-red-lightning-photographed-on-atmospheric-research-mission/

Finally, I subscribe to a forum on risks to the public in computer and related systems.  Paul Fenimore sent in an item about the NWS website.  He wrote:

Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:23:48 -0600
From: Paul Fenimore <fenimore@swcp.com>
Subject: Easter Eggs in Infrastructure Software

The US National Weather Service's website <www.weather.gov> returns a
forecast for Manhattan when the location "evil" is searched. Finding rogue
search results for a US Government service that is critical to safety is
concerning enough, but when I tried to make an HTTPS connection to the
National Weather Service's website to verify the "validity" of the results,
I immediately received a warning that the SSL certificate is invalid. The
cert was valid, but for Akami Technologies (07:27:A4:69), and was flagged
for possible hijacking of the connection.  The risks? Farming out important,
probably even critical, parts of the Weather Service's infrastructure with
loss of control or even knowledge of what is going on, the opportunity for
faked connections to www.weather.gov, and the introduction of incorrect
behavior into critical code, probably for the sake of a very bad taste
"joke".

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter, @skydaver 
Thanks for listening, Skydaver out.


Sent to JB
A great video on Astronomy Picture of the Day, showing Aurora & Noctilucent clouds
If you can send this video to your TV … do it!
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130819.html


Audio Fog Bank