A Cinema Of Nature In The Bavarian Alps – The HÖRNLE MOUNTAIN

Peter Engelmann, October 13, 2024

Every mountain peak in the Alps is a great experience. But here is one that makes you feel like watching the green pastures of the countryside in front of the Alps from a seat on an airplane.

The Hoernle Mountain, which actually consists of three mountain peaks of different heights, sits at the beginning of the Ammergauer Mountains mountain range. It’s close to Bad Kohlgrub, a well-known Bavarian holiday destination and spa. From here, a steep path leads up to the mountain.

There is a fantastic panoramic viewpoint on top near the chairlift station. It’s special because there is nothing on the west, north, or east sides. Only on the south side and south-west are higher mountains. That little peak near the station and the cozy Hörnle cabin has been called Zeitberg since 2013.

The other Hörnle peaks require some walking, but that little peak already provides a unique experience. They call it a “nature 3d cinema”. Wooden banks invite you to stay. It is indeed a cinema in nature. It provides great opportunities for photographers and videographers.

You can see a couple of lakes from the mountaintop. To the northeast, there is Lake Staffelsee, a famous lake near Murnau where lots of artists live and where famous painters such as Gabriele Münter lived.

Another lake in the north is Starnberger See, the second largest lake in Bavaria. Between the lake and the mountains, there are villages, hills, and woodland. It’s good to have a day with some clouds which create an interplay of light and shadow. This adds to the impression of depth in landscape photography.

In the lower half of the picture is Bad Kohlgrub. A destination is known for its mud bath. The suspension railway starts from here. It is also the train stop for the train coming from Murnau, which heads then to Oberammergau.

The mountain path is steep but a great experience. Normally everyone can do it. But if you have problems walking down a steep path consider the suspension railway as an alternative.

A unique sight from the mountaintop is the chain of the Ammergauer Alps. This is a nature park and some areas resemble a wilderness, but it is also where the famous Linderhof castle is located. The Ammergauer Alps offer a lot of great experiences as the Grinding Mill Gorge (Schleifmühlenklamm).

What impressed me most on the mountaintop was the big sky. Yes, this is a cinema of nature. It’s fantastic to watch the clouds moving and constantly changing.

At the bottom of the picture above is the “Hörnle Schwebebahn”, an attraction itself. It’s called a suspension railway with a Double swivel chair. This is a unique construction like nowhere else: When you reach your destination you don’t need to jump away to avoid being hit by the chair like other chairlifts. The chairs rotate 90 degrees and you can walk away. The chairlift went into operation in 1954 and brought tourists within 20 minutes to the mountain top and the Hörnle-Cabin til today. It operates both in winter and in summer but check before if you plan your trip here.

The Hoerlen suspension railway is approximately a 25-minute walk from the train station Bad Kohlgrub. From Munich or Augsburg, you take the train to Murnau and change for the train to Oberammergau. The ride with the train is a great experience itself.

I strongly recommend checking weather conditions before: If it is rainy the steep path might be slippery and be careful if there is snow. There is a so-called “Winter path” but due to the steepness, I would be careful with that if you are not an experienced hiker.

by Waldmeister Categories: natural wonders, Travel Tip, Uncategorized

Devastating Super-Cell Storm in Upper Bavaria on July 10, 2024

Peter Engelmann, July 11, 2024

Weather services warned the day before and were right: In the afternoon of Wednesday, July 10, 2024, a severe weather system hit Bavaria with full force. One epicenter of the devastating storm was the municipality of Holzkirchen, South of Munich. Large hail, flooding, gale-force winds, and lightning left chaos amid rush-hour traffic.

Fire Starters had their hands full of work with flooded cellars and damaged roofs. Rail transport was interrupted and was down for hours. Many overturned trees blocked streets and rails. Passengers were trapped for hours.

In West Upper Bavaria and elsewhere the approaching weather system was an awesome sight:

Shortly before 3. pm, a drama unfolds in the sky. Note the different layers of clouds which seemed stacked above each other. After approximately 20 minutes the weather system came closer fast.

As with previous extreme weather situations this year the amount of rain was impressive. Streets were flooded within minutes. The super-cell storm is the last in a series of extreme weather events in 2024. In May a flood set whole villages near Augsburg under water after days of rain. Weather remains unstable for a longer time. The amount of rain and sudden flash floods underline the change in the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere due to human-made climate change can contain more atmospheric humidity and lead to more extreme weather: Heat waves and flooding are the new normal.

This might be mistaken for a tornado but it is a low-hanging cloud.

The severe weather system has approached with interesting and unique cloud patterns. In some moments it looked like the clouds would hit the ground. The timelapse video below shows the chaos in the atmosphere. It got pretty dark shortly before the rain arrived. Since the cameras are not waterproof the coverage presents only the beginning of the arriving storm. When the storm arrived there was some lighting and intense rain for a long time.

Even though it was the middle of the day it got pretty dark.

Late in the day, the rain stopped and the sun appeared again. But the humidity was still high and more thunderstorms are expected for the next days. The temperature was a bit lower but climbed again on the next day. July is the typical month in middle Europe for hot temperatures and severe thunderstorms. They happen more likely in the mountainous terrain in Southern Germany. The super-cell storm like yesterday, which often starts in the area where the river Lech leaves the Alps is called “Lechtalerin”. Typically it intensifies on its path to the East. These types of supercells are often long-living and move a long way. They should never be underestimated.

Nevertheless, the weather phenomena on the north side of the Alps are a unique opportunity for photographers and filmmakers to take breathing images and portray the forces of nature. Timelapses are revealing movements and dynamics in the weather system. In this case, two cameras were used for the video, one shot in timelapse mode, the other in normal mode with 60 fps. The coverage of the normal video was accelerated. This method gives more options to get good footage of thunderstorms.

by Waldmeister Categories: Climate Change, Severe Weather, Stormchasing, Thunderstorm, Uncategorized

Epic G 5 Geostorm And Northern Lights, May 10, 2024

Peter Engelmann, May 18, 2024

On the evening of Friday, May 10,  2024, a dream for many people came true. Seeing the aurora borealis, the mysterious Northern Lights. An extraordinary solar event made it possible. Northern Lights appeared not only in  Northern Latitudes but in many places from San Francisco to Italy to Lviv.

The reason was the most intense solar storm in decades. A barrage of CMES (Coronal Mass Ejections) and Solar Flares launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth. This led to the strongest solar storm within the last two decades and probably created one of the strongest displays of aurora borealis in the past 500 years according to NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/how-nasa-tracked-the-most-intense-solar-storm-in-decades/

NASA said this storm was so strong it was only paralleled by famous events in 1958 and 2003. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center warned about the upcoming storm because solar storms can seriously affect satellites, and power grids and endanger the health of astronauts. However, unlike the Carrington Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event), no serious outages or damages were reported.

Therefore this epic geo-storm became an event for enthusiastic nature lovers, scientists, photographers, and filmmakers. Since mobile phones are more light-sensitive they show the aurora borealis better than the naked eye. Furthermore, pictures with mobile phones and posted on social media showed us the broad variety of the ever-changing otherworldly Northern Lights. 

There also is scientific value to this. The extraordinary event produced for scientists highly valuable material they will now study for years. NASA is collecting the pictures taken by enthusiasts around the globe for research (https://aurorasaurus.org/).

The storm reached the highest level G5 and happened in the midst of the most activity during the 11-year cycle of the sun. Astronomers have also been following huge sunspots for months now.

How to know if Aurora Borealis is happening?

The extraordinary G5 event triggered the interest of many.  People who missed the Northern Lights would love to see them. One way to keep informed is to check the Space Weather Forecast and its Aurora 30-minute forecast ( https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast) It might be necessary to do some research to properly understand the page, but there are numerous YT videos about aurora borealis out there. Please don’t compare it too much with the weather forecast. Compared to meteorology space weather forecast is relatively new and there are limited measurement instruments out there. Scientists are still learning. Thus the first thing we need to learn is a lot of patience. I also recommend reading astronomer forums on social media regularly  But how do you know an aurora borealis is happening at your place? Is it worth driving or walking in the middle of the night? I can only tell what I did: When I learned about the possibility I checked a photo-webcam side every 10 minutes on my computer. I detected the aurora borealis first on the Zugspitze-Webcam in Bavaria. You might want to watch out for webcams looking towards the North. Because in the Northern Hemisphere, you usually see them in the Northern sky and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere.

What are the conditions for watching the Northern Lights?

Of course, it has to be dark. Not completely but you need a dark sky. May 10 was great because the moon was there but no half- or full-moon. And you need a mostly clear sky. There are also good opportunities for even very creative and impressive pictures with some clouds or a thunderstorm. But the Northern Lights don’t shine through clouds. Fog or dust doesn’t work. A veiled sky with a strato nimbus cloudscape doesn’t work.

Where to watch the Northern Lights?

People make expensive trips to Norway to watch the Northern Skies. This is not the issue here. What can you do to see the Northern Skies if they appear in your place? First of all: find a dark place. These mobile phone pictures let the Northern Lights appear brighter as they are. Nearly everyone uses long exposure times. But it is a great experience to see them with the naked eye in the first place. It is possible to see the Northern Lights in big cities, I saw the first time a red Northern Light in the middle of Berlin in 2000. But as darker as better. A field, a mountain, or a coastline is great (it is not necessary to get to a higher elevation, but of course, conditions are often better because the air is cleaner with less dust).  If you go out to the countryside a flashlight is important. Astronomers often use a red filter in front of the light, because the eyes need to adapt to darkness to see better and red light is less disturbing. Take your time to adapt to the situation. The other thing really important is a free horizon, particularly a free Northern horizon. If you have a lake nearby – perfect! Go to the south end of the lake and look to the north.

How to photograph the Northern Lights?

There are countless tutorials out there and if you are fine with the quality of mobile phone pictures it’s quite easy. Of course, a tripod or a stable position is an important prerequisite.

I don’t have a manual or guidelines, but the most important question is knowing what you want. Do you want realistic pictures or a more artistic,  impressive, maybe even psychedelic impression? Do you want just to have the Northern Lights in the frame or an interesting foreground, a special composition? The possibilities are endless. 

If you head for better quality a bigger camera is good to have. In an ideal case use a fast lens. I used aperture 2,8 to 4. Of course ramp ISO up but it’s not necessary to max it out. The Northern Lights are often strong enough and you can avoid unnecessary noise. I heard exposure times of 20-20” seconds are recommended. I did shorter (at the cost of having some noise in my image) but it depends. Remember that if you do exposure times longer than 30 seconds the stars or the moon become stripes due to Earth’s rotation. I did shorter.

What’s important is to be aware of Focus: Auto Focus in some cameras doesn’t work properly in darkness! I set the focal length close to infinite, after some unsharp pictures.

One really important setting is to shoot in RAW if possible:

There is an interesting thing about Northern Lights: White Balance. Some people say around 4000 K but I found that the Aurora Borealis is a unique light source. If you shoot in RAW you can play with White Balance, Hue, and Saturation in post-production and get the best results. I encourage you to do this and unlock the full potential of pictures.

One last tip: As the Aurora Borealis often appears fast and is constantly changing preparation of the right settings is good and do as many pictures as you can. There is a lot of variety here. The slide show shows different facets of the May 10 storm:

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https://youtu.be/RcXOJHe05ok?si=nAVtgmVDDM9vRLFU
by Waldmeister Categories: Astronomy, natural wonders, Photography Tips And Tricks, UncategorizedTags: , , , , , ,

Record Snow, Chaos, And Winter Wonderland

That was an unexpected start to the winter. Used to often warmer winters over the last years the tons of snow on the First Advent in the region North of the Alps and Austria had an American feeling of real winters in the North or simply the times before climate change, when cold winters with lots of snow were normal.

On December 1, 2023, a 5B Weather Situation and an air mass limit led to new record snowfall in Upper Bavaria. In only a few hours a thick layer of snow stopped trains and airplanes around Munich, causing over 90 traffic jams and many blackouts on Saturday, December 2.

A surprise in the morning: A thick layer of snow on the table.

There was so much snow that even on December 2, an emergency state in the capital of Bavaria lasted. One reason is that every weather event is different: In this case, the snow was wet and lasted on branches of trees. Some trees feel or parts of the trees broke apart. Therefore police and first responders had a lot of work.

It began in the afternoon hours on December 1 when the rain turned more and more into white blobs. The evening hours saw intense snowfall. It was snowing and snowing and in a few hours, the landscape was completely under a thick layer of white. That was too much for winter services to cope with.

In the morning hours of December 2, it was clear that it would take a lot of time and effort to clear streets, garages, and gardens from the mass of snow. Snowing didn’t stop before late afternoon. A cold night followed. On Sunday the weather calmed but it became even colder.

That first advent will be remembered as a true Winter Wonderland dream. Frost, the thick sheets of snow and ice created fantastic scenery in Bavaria and in the Alps.

Due to the nature of this weather event where snow often was attached to trees and other things it formed interesting sculptures.

With a little imagination, the fields were filled with strange creatures and an endless variety of forms.

Warmer temperatures and a cold night led to these interesting effects.

The trees were veiled in sheets of snow, ice, and frost. In one place there was an ice-curtain.

Here is a little red contrasting the white:

Antennas weren’t spared.

This fence had a lot of frost crystals.

The early morning hours are the best time to capture Winter Wonderland scenery. The cold air is very clear and a deep blue sky contrasts the white trees and fields.

It is always a good idea to bring some elements into the picture that add to the atmosphere as old barns or houses.

An attraction is small streams that are not yet frozen. If the water is warmer it creates often a thin veil of mist which looks great when illuminated by the sun.

by Waldmeister Categories: natural wonders, Seasons, Severe Weather, Uncategorized, Winter