Watching clouds, weather and snow

It’s quite an isolated life up here but there are many compensations.  One is that I spend most of my days working at the kitchen table in the dining room/kitchen of our apartment here.  I’ve moved the table to the window which looks out almost due north (1°, i.e. just E of N according to my ‘phone but I don’t trust it!) That means I look up the valley down below that joins Aime la Plagne to Bourg Saint Maurice and to Mont Blanc towering over everything.  The view is sensational and always changing.  At times there is no view as cloud can descend and wrap the place in white out, at other times Mont Blanc is crystal clear (I must find out how far away it is).

Soon after I first came up here I got into the rhythm of taking a ‘photo using my UK ‘phone pretty much on the hour every hour I was here, using a fixed point on the window to hold the view steady.  One day I will stitch them into some hugely accelerated time lapse film.  However, a few days ago I had one of those whims to which I’m prone:

“What if I used one of the android timelapse apps with my old ‘phone to grab something smoother?”

Well, of course it’s taken a bit of fiddling around and experimenting but I like the results I’m getting now.  So here is the first usable clip.  From Wednesday last week (31st of October, 2018).  Courtesy of a battered Sony Xperia ‘phone and FrameLapse Pro from Neximo labs and served by vimeo.

I really like the way that shows how the high clouds are moving in one wind system (low jetstream?) and the lower clouds are moving in another that is being blown pretty much at right angles to the higher one.

Here’s the following day with pretty much all the daylight hours this time.

Then the second was the most snow and white out since I started this game. I love the vortices coming up from the apartment block immediately below on the left.  I’ve never seen them in real time but they’re just below my sightline so perhaps they’re perfectly visible if I were just a bit higher up.

OK.  Enough.  More on my vimeo pages at https://vimeo.com/cpsyctc and, as with most of creations, work or play, unless I have to hand them over to a moneygrabbing publisher, these are free to reuse subject only to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[Added 11.xi.18: The videos now appear in my public diary: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/ecwd_calendar/calendar/ and I have a page listing them: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/timelapse-videos/]