the best of Union County’s thunderstorm season (second half, which is when I got here!), and a couple odds and ends. Taken throughout September and October of 2009.


Lightning just after sunset, and my favorite picture of the season. It was dark enough that I needed only moderately quick reflexes to try to catch a lightning bolt, as the exposure lengths were approaching 1/8 second (this one was 3/16 I believe), and the same ionization channel – which is how electricity gets through many hundreds of feet of air, between the cloud and the ground – will tend to feature several bolts as much as a full second or two apart, as the cloud discharges its entire potential bits and pieces at a time. So you have a good chance of getting something late if you squeeze the shutter on the first one you see.



Moonrise and one lingering thunderhead.


This one is done in infrared, which explains the odd colors. The reason for that is because the camera loses 8 stops, so I can hope to capture lightning in midafternoon without having those aforementioned extraordinarily quick reflexes. Here, the exposure length in visible light would be about 1/160 or 1/125 seconds (much faster than a human response!) – but with the blessedly inefficient infrared filter, I can have an exposure of 1.5-2 seconds – which means just keep clicking the shutter, over and over again.

What shows up as brown is about 830nm infrared (to get a frame of reference: the human eye sees light from violet to red: visible violet begins around 380nm and visible red ends around 720nm) and the blue channel is 900nm infrared. When you use an IR filter to block out the camera’s visible-light receiving sensibilities, you end up – due to detection vagueries in the camera’s sensors – with very competent infrared transmission. And yes, elements like trees, grass, stop signs, and most importantly, clouds and lightning, all show up in those frequencies as well.


Oh here, have some signs. And Dale’s ubiquitous rain gauge which may or may not operate as a howitzer.


For some variety… we’re looking south now, over the greenhouse roof. Every night, the thunderclouds congregated – sometimes they released their lightning, other times like this one, they just floated briefly orange and faded away as the sun set.


A particularly late-night event: this was almost 11 o’clock. Prime thunderstorm time is between about 5 and 10pm; too late and the sun no longer provides energy to the clouds to generate lightning; but this one apparently decided to show up late.


And here is one from sunrise; note the halo around the sun. That is the 23 degree halo that will be seen when the high clouds, as seen here, yield ice crystals that refract the sunlight just so. The halo is a relative to the rainbow, but due to the difference in shape between raindrops (sphere) and ice crystals (hexagon-and-square facet sharp-edged polyhedron), and the way those differences bounce the light waves in very particular directions: the halo appears very, very close to the sun, as opposed to the other side of the sky as you can see in a rainstorm.


I actually blew out the red channel on this one. It was like this – the brilliant red light – for about fifteen amazing seconds as the sun descended to the horizon and then vanished behind the Sangre del Christo mountains (130 miles away). This photo is using that sunlight and looking east over Sierra Grande and the surrounding foothills.


Super extra large sunset photo (click on large version, which is about 3000×4500 pixels). I stitched this one together from three immediately consecutive exposures as I stood in the cow pasture and I took pictures starting from the horizon and ending up at near-vertical: we cover 90 degrees of sky from the horizon to the pink clouds.


And here is a picture one of just the high clouds, isolated, at the time when the difference between white and pink clouds (as illuminated by sun beams that passed through different layers of the Earth’s atmosphere) was maximum.


For something different… the last old traffic signal in Raton. Dale says this dates back to the 1940s. I just know it says “red light – stop” about half the time :)