Zero Visibility, January 2014

“Zero visibility Sir”, I must have heared that sentence at least 5 times last Wednesday, including a stamp with the same message on my entry ticket.

Last week I was again in New York, for my job. And when I travel, I always check the position of the sun and moon for that period. A nice tool for doing that is The Photographer’s Ephemeris (I have that on my laptop, unfortunately they don’t have a Windows Phone version yet, only one for iOS and one for Android). And what did I discover: on 15th January it was full moon. And the moon was rising at an interesting time (about the same time when the sun was setting) and at a nice location. I could already see the opportunity for a nice picture with a full moon above Manhattan, taken from the Empire State Building.

I had checked upfront how fast I could get from the location of the conference I was attending to the Empire State Building (10 minutes on the Subway) and I had already bought my ticket online to avoid waiting.

But… to have a nice view, the weather has to cooperate… I had checked the weather forecast and it was ‘partly clouded’… When I exited the Subway, I saw the top of the Empire State Building playing ‘hide and seek’ with some clouds. And at the entrance of the building, the first thing I heared was: “Zero visibility Sir”, with the advice not to go up. And I heared that message at least 5 times, but I wanted to try it. It was also my last evening in New York and I had already paid for my ticket.

What I saw when I arrived at the ‘main observation deck’ was beautiful! The clouds were a bit lower than the observation deck and sometimes the top of the buildings appeared from the clouds, playing hide and seek. The view was wonderful… :-)

Eddy

PS: a small disclaimer: I got lucky. At other times ‘zero visibility’ can really mean zero visibility… It is always at your own risk when you go up when there is zero visibility.

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