One of the great bonuses of taking photos while flying is, when I get home and download the images to my computer, I can take a closer look. Things that I saw while flying can be puzzling… but close looks can sometimes turn up some interesting things.
I still get comments about the “white dots� in the field (click here to read the full story). Although they probably are a melon, even looking at it at full magnification didn’t solve that riddle.
Here’s what I saw on a recent flight…
My first glance
First you have to understand that I only feel safe looking at a subject on the ground for about, oh, 6 seconds or so. I then re-reference my plane, the horizon, the pitch, the speed, scan all the instruments, check for other traffic, adjust the plane and/or myself as necessary, and then I might get another look. So the camera is a much better “eye� than my own.
So, after finishing my first glance at these items on the ground, my thoughts were, “someone is really messy with all that lumber!�. It was puzzling because it seemed to me that you’d have to go to a LOT of trouble to scatter those boards around like that. Or maybe it was a giant playing Pick-Up Sticks.
Arriving home, and taking a closer look, it was surprising to see that it wasn’t lumber at all, but poles, and I had totally missed the wheels….
Wheels and poles
The other thing about a photo is, your eye typically zeros in on a single point, and you pick up the rest of the scene via peripheral vision. And peripheral vision isn’t very sharp or comprehensive. The photo allows me to take a closer look at the surrounding area, too.
a stack of poles
The poles are stacked together in one spot, and — I’m guessing — assembled as a unit with the wheel by pushing the pole through the middle, or axle, of the wheel. My final guess is that these are the makings of a rolling irrigation system. I’ve seen a long line of water spraying equipment on wheels, usually in a long curved line across a field. When I’ve seen these irrigation systems, my eye has always been focused on the water spraying out of the nozzles, in graceful arcs of spray. I have actually wondered about the wheels but they just were never interesting enough to pay them much attention. I can also remember wondering how these long, lanky structured are actually propelled across the field. There are many things about farming which are a mystery to me.
But the closer look allowed me to get a snapshot of one tiny detail of how these things are assembled. Uh, if that’s what they are.