Shots and Misses

There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t.

When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what remained of a giant blister of salt that heaved upward and collapsed beneath what became desert in recent eras. But it seemed obvious to me at the time that this was a crater, because it looked like one and was unlike all the other landforms around it.

I suspect by now the placards on the trail there now harmonize with this paragraph from the Wikipedia page for the site:

The currently accepted theory is an interpretation of the dome as an eroded impact crater, like the much younger Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona. In the 1990s, a team of geologists and seismologists from NASA and the University of Nevada at Reno performed a detailed study that included seismic refraction and rock mapping. The results of this study support the meteorite theory.[2][3] In 2008, it was announced that shocked quartz was discovered in addition to the numerous impact-related features described by Kriens et al. in 1998.[4]

Anyway, I came to love the whole region, and have shot it often from my window seat on jets passing overhead. The photo above is the title one on the Wikipedia page for the crater (still called a dome). I shot it through the window of a flight from Newark to Los Angeles. The whole collection from that flight is here.

My camera was a 2005 Canon EOS 5D with a Canon EF28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, neither of which is nearly as good as what I shoot with now. Since 2022, my main camera-lens pair has been a Sony a7iv and a Sony FE 24-105mm f/4 G OSS lens, which Ken Rockwell calls “the world’s best midrange zoom (with) spectacular optical performance as well as first-rate mechanical construction at half the price of similar lenses (while also) smaller, lighter and (with) better ergonomics than the more expensive lenses.” It’s almost perfect for shooting out plane windows, and is half the weight and bulk of my old Canon pair.

But it’s not perfect, because I can’t shoot from every angle, especially looking down. For that, however, I now have my Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is the ideal way to shoot around smudges, scratches, and other flaws in airplane windows—and down toward what neither the Sony nor my own eyeballs can see.

I bring this up because I have been hoping to give the world a better shot of the Upheaval Dome than the one now in Wikipedia. My latest chance came yesterday, on a flight from Santa Barbara to Chicago. After our plane crossed the San Rafael Swell and approached the Green River and Canyonlands, I could see (from my hand-held GPS, my phone, and the plane’s seat-back map) that I might get a view of the crater. It’s the round-ish canyon above and to the right of the plane’s shadow in this view of the plane’s map:

While we flew just south of it (at 622 mph, my GPS said), my Sony couldn’t see it, but my iPhone could. Here’s the series I shot with it:

I couldn’t see what I was shooting, because my phone was looking down from the top of the window, and my view of the phone’s screen was edge-on. So I just guessed at where I was aiming. Alas, while my aim wasn’t bad, the angle was too steep.

But I still got hundreds of other nice shots on the trip, and I’ll put them up soon, annotated and licensed for easy re-use. That way they might end up in Wikimedia Commons (source for Wikipedia pages) and news stories without my further involvement. You might think of my photos as an artesian source of whatever.