We had some spare time today, so we decided to take a drive out to Lake Pleasant in North Maricopa County, Arizona. It was really too hot to have a picnic like we originally intended, so we drove up to the visitors center and took some pictures. I made this panoramic image that shows only a portion of the lake from Bass Bay on the left to the New Waddell Dam on the right. Click on the thumbnail image for the full panorama – remember to use the scroll bars to pan the image left and right.
We decided to take the scenic route down to Buckeye, Arizona from Wickenburg to shop at Wal-Mart and Lowes. We’re looking for furnishings for the new house – ranges, ovens, refrigerators, laundry appliances etc. plus we needed to pick up a few supplies for our stay here in Arizona this week.
On the way down Vulture Mine Road, we passed through a very scenic area with saguaro cactus, ocotillo, cholla, creosote and palo verde dominated by rugged and imposing Vulture Peak. I believe there is a hiking trail leading to this interesting volcanic mountain peak.
Image – Vulture Peak – click image to enlarge.
When you see the Arizona Flag, there’s really no need to wonder how the artistic inspiration for the Arizona Sunburst came to the designer . . .
We woke up to this beautiful sunburst in Ehrenberg, AZ, this morning. Click on the image to enlarge.
It gets a little warm in July . . .
Light blogging travel days coming up.
Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix Metro area, extends far enough North to include Wickenburg which is where our new home will be. The statistics below show a significant shift to the right, probably because of the county’s voters collective disgust with The administration and Congress in D.C. and approval of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer‘s Constitutional gun and immigration enforcement policies.
From the Campaign Spot:
A Sudden Shift in Maricopa County Voter Registration
By Jim Geraghty
This June in Arizona’s Maricopa County, 227 voters switched from no affiliation or some other party to the Democratic party. This includes 44 former registered Republicans.
Another 211 voters switched to “independent”; this total included 55 Democrats and 69 Republicans.
Another 217 left the Democratic party to become “Party Not Designated.”
And 530 joined the Republican party, including 190 former registered Democrats and 252 who were “Party Not Designated.”
Emphasis added.
I hope those two dumbasses go down hard in November and can do no further damage to the economy. But that’s probably just wishful thinking . . .
This is an interesting article on the SOHO website. The speeding of the internal plasma circulation is connected with the deepest solar minimum in a century.
One of the outstanding questions facing solar physicists is the origin of the solar magnetic cycle: What drives the 11-year sunspot cycle? We have just passed an extended and deep minimum, unlike any in the past 100 years. The late onset of the new solar cycle (#24) and the unusually deep minimum between cycles 23 and 24 took all experts by surprise, which suggests that there is a fundamental lack in our understanding of the origin of the solar activity cycle.
Image: Artist’s concept of the Sun’s meridional circulation, a large scale flow that transports solar plasma from the equator to the poles and back like a giant conveyor belt. Credit: Science@NASA
The Sun’s meridional circulation is a massive flow pattern within the Sun that transports hot plasma near the surface from the solar equator to the poles and back to the equator in the deeper layers of the convection zone, similar to a “conveyor belt”. The flow is rather slow, with typical speeds of 10-15 m/s (20 to 30 mph). The structure and strength of this meridional flow is believed to play a key role in determining the strength of the Sun’s polar magnetic field, which in turn determines the strength of the sunspot cycles. One class of dynamo models predicts that a stronger meridional flow produces weaker polar fields, whereas another class of models predicts stronger polar fields (and a shorter sunspot cycle) for the same flow. [more]
