Joe, Marilyn, and I went out late Sunday afternoon and hiked out a ways on the Dixie Mine Trail.
There were several contrails that hung around for the duration of our hike. Here’s a photo where they seem to form a “V” emanating from behind one of the McDowells.
Weaver’s Needle is off in the distance in the photo below. You can also see a part of Dixie Mine Trail in the foreground. It’s a nice trail in that section. There’s not a lot of elevation gain or loss, but numerous small hills and washes give texture to the terrain.
The half-moon and a nearby saguaro:
A particularly scenic section of the Dixie Mine Trail:
Mother and son hiking together just after sunset.
Another view of the contrails as the sun was setting:
A short while later, we turned to see that the setting sun had turned the contrails a brilliant reddish orange:
Another edit of the above photo using the Mantiuk ’06 contrast mapping algorithm. All of the above photos use the Mantiuk ’06 contrast equalization algorithm. In the tests that I’ve done, contrast mapping seems to produce more realistic looking results, but I often like the look obtained using contrast equalization. The sky in the photo below is fairly close to the image obtained out-of-camera, but the out-of-camera foreground detail is very dark; so dark in fact that it appears to be mostly black.
