Falling Stars and City Lights

This last weekend was the return of the annual Perseid meteor shower.  Some rates included seeing up to 100 meteors per hour.  Unfortunately a small system moved in Saturday night causing cloud cover.  The site that I thought would have been light free apparently went through a mighty makeover and there was light pollution everywhere.

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 Heading back I took an HDR shot of Hillsboro's mean streets.

Dust on the lens, not a ghost.

The next night, I went a little closer to home and ended up in a fairly good spot.  A couple local grain elevators and cities caused some light pollution, but I could make out the Milky Way's faint arm.  A strange orange colored thunderstorm (I'm guessing heat lightning) pulled my attention to the North.  In the photo below, you can see it between the three trees.

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OZ?

One of the clearer space shots I've done.

 The last shot of space came out the best.  No shooting stars but lots of stars and a galaxy to boot.  I'm still playing with settings and thing I need to lower the ISO.  I also wish there was a great dark spot close to home so I could go out and wonder more often.

Drought and A Little Relief

Last month we received 0.22" of rain.  Cracks are staring to form in the soil where the grass has given up the ghost.  July tied for the 4th hottest in our history.  2011 was the 2nd hottest.  So as we are waiting for dustbowls and locusts a small cold front fired through last night.

Corn or what's left of it

At least something is growing

I thought I heard something and went outside to look, a bolt of lightning hit less than a mile from the house.  I miss lightning but in conditions like this, CG (cloud to ground) strikes can cause bad fires.

Starlight, moonlight, city lights

Moon breaking through

Drought With No End In Sight

Lat two days were 111 degrees.  Today 106.  I think we've received 0.11" of rain this month.  Corn is already being harvested to cut losses and let farmers break even.  Until we get rain we can only dream of thunder.  I found this last evening while working on server issues.  I'm not a tech guy, but it gave me time to surf old photo files and see some things I hadn't posted.  This storm was a nice electrical one from May 30th, 2012.  Brown haze on clouds are city lights from Wichita.

But You Will Never Know the Wonders I've Seen

I was a huge fan of Farscape when it was on, now with the magic of Netflix I've been catching up on past episodes.  Really one of the best sci-fi shows on TV.

There are clouds on the horizon and a cold front on the way, but we've only received 0.11" of rain this month and everything is parched.  There is only a 30% chance of rain. Hope for the best.

Instead of pictures of scorched earth and dying corn stalks, something a little different.

Space Stuff per Space.com.




Source Space.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Billions and Billions of Stars

I went out to a nice location in the middle of nowhere last night and tried some more galactic photography.  Something odd was happening with the fisheye lens and I couldn't focus well.  These shots were taken near Marion Lake in Kansas.  These shots were taken looking to the north (hopefully glimpsing a little auroral activity.  You might see some streaks of light in the photos, these were satellites passing overhead.

The white haze in the photograph was the spiral arm of the milky way.

Train coming, not sure what city that was to the east of my location.  Maybe Peabody.

Train, may crop this, love how it lights up the trees.

strange effect with the fisheye lens.

More Pop Ups 07/08/2012

Another round of little thunderstorms with little to no movement and no rain for my area.  Lots of thunder but little visible lightning.  This was not severe.

Rather large panoramic photo of the storm initializing.

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Storm had died at this point.  I like how the anvil is withering. 

Pop Up Storms 07/07/2012

It's been dry for a long time. With the devistating wild fires in Colorado it was nice to see rain, even though it was at a distance.  One of my old haunts lovingly referred to as the perch now has high power floodlights.  I stood beside the building and used a quick shutter speed to drown it out and the city lights over Wichita.

Not sure what this hit.