Category Archives: Weather Photography

One morning last week near the end of a midnight shift, I noticed a sun dog to the east. Sun dogs are optical phenomenon that are formed from a low sun angle (rising or setting sun) combined with transparent cirrus clouds. The tiny ice crystals that compose cirus clouds reflect and refract the incoming sunlight, producing a horizontally offset bright spot. Although this particular one didn’t exhibit much in the way of color, some sun dogs will display a prism or rainbow color spectrum along the edges of the bright spot. In the two pictures below, the view is toward the east as the sun was rising; the brighter spot to the right is the sun and the other irregular-shaped spot to the left side of the frame is the sun dog.

sun dog 1

sun dog 2

There was a great lightning show from a slow moving cluster of storms over the south side of Albuquerque tonight. This first shot was a 39 second exposure that I took from the backyard. You can see the lights of a plane streaking across the frame as it departed and turned toward me. The storms had just moved south of the airport, and departing aircraft were obviously gettting routed north away from the convection.
There were also some faint “anvil crawlers” on the north side of the storms as seen below.

The southwestern monsoon is underway, and last night I was able to successfully capture some lightning shots with digital. I had tried a couple of times previously, but didn’t have any luck…mostly because of storm location. I’m sure there will be some color and clarity differences between lightning on film versus being shot with digital…but I really love instantaneously seeing my results instead of waiting a week for film to get processed and scanned to a digital format. This first image below is my favorite. I composed the frame looking east with my recently installed annemometer in the foreground. From the 7 to 8 second lag in thunder, I assume this strike was about a mile and a half east of me (and the annemometer), but coincidentally the strike appears to have danced around the annemometer.

Below is the same shot as above, except with a much tighter crop, so you can see the erratic looping path of the lightning channel.

Below is another shot looking east that I thought was a “keeper”.

I also had about three other “keepers” that I shot from inside the garage. It was raining pretty steadily, and I couldn’t get out to a more favorable location…so you can see the inside wall of the garage on the right side of the following three pics. You’ll also notice that the street light to the lower left was also intermittently turning off due to the brightness of the lightning flashes.