Sure-As-Shootin' Leonids

Two bright "shooting stars" (horizontal lines at lower left) from the annual Leonids meteor shower streak across the northeast sky in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the early morning of November 17, 1998. The meteors are emanating from the "radiant," or origin, located in the constellation Leo at far right. This 20-minute time exposure, begun around 1:30 AM, looks toward Council Street NE. The meteor shower, which extends from November 13-21 each year, is the result of debris from the comet Tempel-Tuttle entering the Earth's upper atmosphere. Most of the debris is merely dust-sized.

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A Little Early For Independence Day

Reminding me very much of the invading alien spacecraft taking up their positions in our skies in the 1996 film Independence Day, this rogue supercell produced an impressive looking wall cloud north of Cedar Rapids, Iowa on May 30, 2002. I was surprised to hear thunder while indoors that evening as the western sky was clear and sunny, so I went outside to see what it was all about. My son and I went up on top of our roof to get a better look at the structure and I captured video of it with my old Sony Handycam Vision Video 8 camcorder. This image, looking north over the Northbrook II residential development and taken at 7:40 PM, is a still captured from our TV screen taken with my Nikon DSLR camera. The isolated supercell moved in a southeasterly direction but slid north and east of our position. Curiously, no sirens sounded in Cedar Rapids, but did so in Marion as the storm passed over that city less than a half-hour later.

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Pillar of Fire

A sun pillar shoots skyward in a brilliant early-January sky in 2000. This photo looks southwest with the setting sun partially hidden behind a silhouetted Northbrook Baptist Church on Boyson Road NE in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sun pillars are formed in cold air when the sun is rising or setting, created from falling ice crystals that reflect the sunlight into a column of light. The ice crystals usually fall from cirrus or alto clouds. A column of light in a sun pillar can extend below the sun as well.

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No Nukes

I was returning home with friends from a backpacking trip in the San Juan National Forest northwest of Durango, Colorado. Later, as we were driving north on US Highway 85/87 just south of Pueblo on Sunday, May 30, 1982, we witnessed this lone towering cumulonimbus cloud in the direction of the city. Because of its mushroom-shaped appearance and the fact that there were no other clouds in sight, we joked that maybe Pueblo had just been nuked in a Cold War attack. As we got closer, though, it was WE who found ourselves under "attack." Our vehicle got hammered with golf ball-sized hail from the storm, forcing us to pull over to side of the road until it passed.

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I See the Lights--I See the Northern Lights

Streamers of green a red radiate from the northeastern sky during an Aurora Borealis display in this short time-exposure capture around 9:30 PM on November 5, 2001. The auroras, more familiarly known as "The Northern Lights," were caused by a powerful solar flare a day earlier. The colorful displays are a result of oxygen and nitrogen atoms in an excited state from the collision of solar wind above 50 miles in the Earth's atmosphere. Green indicates oxygen emissions; red, nitrogen. The bright star at top center is Capella. The planet Saturn is the left bright spot in the red area above the house roof, the star Aldebaran is next to it at right. Rising but partially obscured by the trees at bottom center is a waning gibbous moon and the planet Jupiter. The houses in the background are located on Brookdale Lane NE in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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Good Lord Willing Or The Creeks Don't Rise...

Unfortunately, the latter was the case on this day. As the Cedar River in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa was causing alarm with its rising waters from continuing heavy rain on the afternoon of Thursday, June 12, 2008, so too were its tributaries. After getting off work that afternoon I got an up-close and personal look at an area of Dry Run Creek in Marion along Boyson Road. In this photo you see the trailhead from the parking lot at Boyson Park. The submerged trail goes between the two trees at center and veers off to the right in the background. The water level at this location, though very high, never quite ran over Boyson Road. Dry Run Creek merges with Indian Creek at Donnelly and Willow parks in Marion. Indian Creek, in turn, merges with the Cedar River south of the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, just west of Highway 13/151.

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Extremes In Weather Out West

Rain, snow and fog closed in on us as we traveled westward through the Bighorn Mountains along US Highway 16 in northern Wyoming on August 14, 1978. Eight of us guys, known collectively as "The Fussum" (it's a long story so don't ask) were taking part in a two-week "whirlwind" tour of the west from our two vehicles. Our route featured stops at the Badlands, Black Hills, Devil's Tower National Monument, Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, Great Salt Desert, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite National Park, San Francisco/Oakland and finally Reno. To show how temperatures can be extreme in a relative close proximity, just two days prior to when this photo was shot while we were in the Badlands of South Dakota, it was clear and 102 degrees!

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