Scud Horizon

Low hanging scud clouds from a passing thunderstorm are seen in the north sky beyond the grounds at Noelridge Christian Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa around 6:42 PM, Thursday, May 24, 2012. 74th Street NE runs horizontally between the baseball diamond and the houses.

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Holiday Road

Eastbound on Interstate 80 just west of Newton, Iowa one was witness to this beautiful cumulonimbus cloud with a spreading anvil top on Memorial Day, Monday, May 28, 2012 around 3:47 PM. We were returning home to Cedar Rapids from a day in the Des Moines area and were treated to this visually evolving structure all the way to our destination.

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Won't Happen Again For A LONG Time!

The next time Venus transits across the sun's face as seen from Earth will be on December 11, 2117, so this was a rare treat to observe. However, weather conditions were not at all favorable from this location at Echo Hill Presbyterian Church in Marion, Iowa on Tuesday, June 5, 2012. Clouds obscured most of the show, which started just after 5:00 PM and ended with sunset. Two exceptions were the images seen above. The inset image was captured from a 60 X 700mm refractor telescope using a Celestron mylar solar filter and shot aiming my camera into an HM25mm eyepiece. The smudges within the disk are clouds. It was photographed at 7:25 PM. The background image was photographed at 200mm focal length around 8:23 PM and faintly shows Venus within the sun's glare.

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Beamin' Through

The sun makes a brief appearance as it tries to shine through the clouds of a thundershower just after 5:00 PM, Tuesday, May 15, 2012. The small window for the sun created these beautiful shafts of light. This view looks west from the grounds at Noelridge Christian Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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Receding Sunlight

A thunderstorm approaches from the southwest (left), overtaking the last remnants of sunlight as seen from the grounds at Noelridge Christian Church around 8:42 PM, Friday, May 25, 2012. The cell produced significant lightning but stayed west of this position.

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Big Bend Vista

Retro photo. Layered cumulus clouds billow south of this arid scenic overlook from the SW Rim along the South Rim Loop trail at Big Bend National Park in SW Texas on Monday, May 28, 1984. The altitude at this point was around 7,000 feet above sea level. This view was part of a two-day backpacking trip along the 12.4-mile trail which in addition to me included friends Tom Bellinger and Chuck Parks.

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Aesthetic Anvil

Except for its color, the cumulonimbus cloud in the top image looked very much like a real anvil as it billowed upward just before 5:30 PM on Memorial Day, Monday, May 28, 2012. This view looks SSE from Bowman Meadows, a new housing development under construction in Marion, Iowa, just south of Boyson Road and west of Alburnett Road. The anvil was part of a long line of storms that fired up in Eastern Iowa Monday afternoon, stretching from NE Missouri to southern Wisconsin. An arrow points to the storm cell in the bottom echo tops radar image (shown as a red rectangle), which at the time was reaching around 45,000 feet in altitude.

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