Skywatch Friday: Looking Beyond and Within New Haven, Connecticut

I have been thinking about Connecticut's very flat winter skies these past several weeks as I have toured the deep and undulating clouds of Scandinavia, dove deep into the sapphire blues of Georgia, and swirled around the diaphanous robes of cloud angels in other parts of the world. Here in Connecticut, the winter sky sits flat and heavy as a lid on a pot, it seems.

In her masterwork Ethan Frome, author Edith Wharton describes such skies: "The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead."

"Exactly." That's about all I can say. Rather than long for a different sky, I have learned to love this one, as my father used to suggest I do about meatloaf night when I was a kid. There's wisdom in that. Three decades later, I can apply it here and enjoy a flat sky behind a New Haven, Connecticut, flattened out by my camera's zoom. By some magic, it sucked the distant features into the foreground so that the city seems to be on one plane perpendicular to that sky. And I love it.

Skywatch Friday