SkyPix

A digital photographic storybook of clouds, weather and water by Roger Edwards.

Wild Night Storm

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A spectacularly stacked supercell twirled southeastward over the western Kansas plains, posing for numerous photos along the way as its laminar layers marvelously metamorphosed in shape and thickness.  This storm generated so much in-cloud lightning, with near continuous frequency, as if it were a giant, strobing night light in the sky, that I was able to check camera settings and walk around in … [Read more...]

Electric Evening

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This was a prolific lightning day for me, with 70 cloud-to-ground strokes captured on the DSLR and a few interesting above-ground discharges as well.  After rolling off the high mesa country to the southwest, I grabbed a room at a familiar motel in Clayton, only to scoot out of town to photograph this briefly but brightly active core closing in from the northwest.  Subtle, pastel shades still … [Read more...]

Bueyeros Boom

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Several square inches of scrubby New Mexico earth scorched for less than a second.  That still was enough time to sterilize it of life, under around 30,000 amperes of direct current surging through that surface to illuminate the lightning channel.  This, of course, sent a nice, strong report of thunder rolling out across the shortgrass prairies.  These storms developed southward from earlier, also … [Read more...]

Electric Lasso over the Borderlands

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Though nothing special structurally, a mass of high-based, multicellular convection offered copious lightning between Tucson and Nogales.  Fortunately this electrical lasso roped only the sky, in true Ghost Riders fashion, instead of ensnaring anyone attempting to photograph it.  The storm also flung its fair share of cloud-to-ground lightning around these nearby mountains, and the scrubby desert … [Read more...]

Sunflower Spark

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An otherwise innocuous summer storm made itself known by hurling lightning across the highest part of the High Plains in northeastern New Mexico.  This part of the Land of Enchantment has been good to me for storm observing, despite the dearth of roads; indeed, nearly 13 months earlier, I shot a head-scratcher of a lightning strike looking a different direction, from just a few yards west of this … [Read more...]

Spreading Sparks

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Numerous cloud-to-ground (CG) strokes split the nighttime sky northeast of Clayton, from a slowly weakening multicell storm that had moved southeastward out of Colorado.  I shot over 50 with this storm alone, and here are two.  Quite possibly, the flash on the right struck soil of the Oklahoma Panhandle, while the one on the left almost certainly was in New Mexico.  Both show that, for lightning, … [Read more...]