SkyPix

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

City Glow at the Country Lakeshore

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After the passage of a weakening complex of thunderstorms, the dearth of backside lightning was disappointing.  Yet something unplanned was present to photograph:  the glow of the nearby Oklahoma City metro area, heavily influenced by tan-orange sodium-vapor lights and reflected off the underside of the anvil shield.  Meanwhile, the lake⁠—its waves smoothed and its surface rendered to a frosted or … [Read more...]

Dew Drops in a Web

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A foggy morning left the remains of overnight arachnid architecture profusely festooned with dew drops.  The dew formed before the fog, but was enlarged to some extent by collision and coalescence with airborne cloud droplets in the fog.  Such conditions highlight just how many spider webs there can be that we may not see under normal circumstances, at least until we walk into them.  I watched a … [Read more...]

Arcus Smacking Mammatus

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For all the weather I've witnessed and cloudscapes spotted over decades, this was a fascinating first:  a shelf (arcus) so high, with mammatus so low, that they were colliding.  The storm was a high-based, High Plains ex-supercell, producing mammatus from the lowest part of the anvil structure in middle levels, almost adjacent to the core.  In less than an hour, countless hundreds of mammatus … [Read more...]

Shelf and Sparks

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An arcus cloud, softly yet wildly textured with assorted spikes, wings, flanges and scuddy protuberances, surfed its parent storm's outflow wall eastward across the Low Rolling Plains of northwest Texas.  All the while, lightning flung in assorted directions within and adjacent to the cores.  This tempestuous sky promised an arduous ordeal of stormy travel to all who ventured westbound toward the … [Read more...]

Different Wavelengths

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Viewing an approaching squall line at night, from east of town, allowed simultaneous photography of natural and artificial light in a cloud sandwich.  Above, the cool bluish hues of lightning flashes shone from within the storms.  Below, the warm, golden-orange glow of the city lights—dominated by sodium vapor street lamps—reflected off the bases and diffused itself through precipitation … [Read more...]

Painted Sky over Dragoon, Arizona

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There is so much going on here!  At first, in the viewfinder, this shot irritated me a bit, because the cloud-to-ground stroke at right appeared uncomfortably overexposed, and I didn't pay much attention to the brief cloud-to-air filament (failed step leader from the same discharge) in the middle, nor to the rainbow.   Yet the rainbow was fleeting and fortunate to capture—less than half a minute … [Read more...]