No More Twist

On the night of March 3rd there was a lunar eclipse, visible from the UK. Remarkably, it was also a very clear night, and the moon was due to be visible from our landing window. Perhaps unrelated, there had been heavy rainfall recently which caused flooding. Here are some pictures.

This is an excerpt of a very wide image. It shows the limit of the detail that can be captured with my camera. I had to use a tripod, maximum zoom, long exposure, minimal aperture, manual focusing, and timed shutter release (to minimise vibrations). If I had captured raw images I might have been able to get a tiny bit more detail – but not much.

This is the whole of the strip, in a shrunken form. The time interval between pictures isn’t regular (the shooting had to fit in with other evening activities, and I was too tired to take many frames in the early hours)

The whole large image (3040×190 pixels) is here.

Here is an animation of the frames. I haven’t corrected the rotation which is a side effect of my budget tripod. I set the intervals between frames according to when the pictures were taken, although I chose to take pictures when the moon looked like it had changed a bit. The result is a bit jumpy. The brightness is also variable as I had to change the exposure according to the amount of light the moon was producing at each stage.

Floods

On to the floods. It was unusual that most of the rainfall seemed to happen at night, and in the day time there were periods of bright sunshine. The ground was saturated for a couple of days and the flooding was topped up several times by further rainfall. The children loved the spectacle of the floods, and we went to see them close up as often as possible.

The view of the flooded valley as seen from the rail crossing footbridge.

The river, which has risen far enough to flow over the flood barrier (the green strip running across the image) at a point, and flood the fields beyond.

The point (on the right of the image) where the flood barrier overflows, perhaps by design.

A view of Station Road taken from the footbridge, showing the flood water covering the road near the pedestrian crossing. When the river floods, the defences on the left are breached, and some water flows across the road from left to right. The raised portion of the road at the recently added pedestrian crossing channels this into a ‘water hazard’ for passing vehicles.

Children enjoy the spectacle as passing cars drive through the floods.

Thorpe Meadows has been created in an area that often floods. There is a park bench entirely underwater in the centre of this image. To the left of the saplings, there is an area that was once occupied by travellers – they would be under a couple of feet of water in this picture!

Finally, two images taken at night. This one shows the river, and in the distance you can see lights from Littlethorpe, and a streak from the lights of a car travelling along Riverside Way.

This is taken from Littlethorpe park facing Narborough. The park is mostly underwater, as is the wooded area and Thorpe Meadows in the distance. You can see the reflections of lights in Narborough.