A vivid rainbow spans the eastern sky after a brief but intense shower just after 5:00 PM on Thursday, August 14, 2008. The spectacle was viewed from the parking lot at Noelridge Christian Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Rainbows mainly form from isolated rain showers separated by reasonably large clear areas. The splash of color is created from light entering a raindrop and being refracted into its component colors.
The setting sun is formed into a sun dog (parhelia) in the southwest sky at Bowman Woods Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa a little after 5:00 PM on February 18, 2008. Sun dogs, also known as mock suns, are created by sunlight refracted through a 22 degree angle by horizontally oriented hexagonal ice crystal plates formed near the ground. They are usually (but not always) seen in very cold conditions. This view looks over a row of houses along Chatham Road NE from the park.
I was playing softball at Noelridge Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on the evening of July 27, 2009 and couldn't get to my camera as a billowing cumulonimbus cloud formed beautifully in the northeast sky. After the game and as I neared home, I finally captured the developing structure (shown here) at 8:20 PM, illuminated by the sun which had just set and sporting an overshooting top. This view looks east from the parking lot at Noelridge Christian Church in Cedar Rapids. The storm cell skirted north of the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area and later passed eastward into Jo Daviess and Stephenson counties in northwest Illinois, some 90 miles away, which was where it was located when this picture was taken. Both Illinois counties experienced severe thunderstorm warnings as a result of the storm cell.
Looking like phantom curtains blowing in the wind, a colorful Aurora Borealis display dazzles the night sky in Cedar Rapids, Iowa around 7:45 PM on November 5, 2001. The Northern Lights first appeared as a whitish glow, not unlike city lights, along the northern horizon, then moved skyward, morphing into different shapes and displaying vivid greens and reds. This view looks northeast over Brookdale Lane NE in the Northbrook II residential development. The bright star at the end of the tree branch at center is Capella. The planet Saturn is the bright object to the right of the tree trunk at far right.
One day removed from full, a rising moon glows from amid clouds in the southeastern sky from Marion, Iowa around 10:00 PM, Monday, July 26, 2010. This composite shot was taken from Timber Oak Court, just off Boyson Road and west of Alburnett Road in Marion. Within an hour of this capture all of the obscuring clouds had gone. The sky was a four-second exposure at f/5.6 with an ISO rating of 400. The waning gibbous moon was shot at 1/2000 sec. at f/5.6.
Sunbeams break through the clouds over the Belle Fourche River valley in northeastern Wyoming on the evening of August 14, 1978. This view looks south from near Devil's Tower National Monument. Devil's Tower, America's oldest national monument (proclaimed as such by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906), was a two-day stop on a two-week vacation trip out west by a group of my friends and me. The unique monument, which rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche valley, is of volcanic origin and was prominently showcased in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Red sky at night, sailor's delight--well, sort of. At least a pink sky in this case. The southeast sky provided this bank of pink cirrocumulus undulatus clouds at Bowman Woods Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa around 8:45 PM on Saturday, July 24, 2010. The more subtle pink sky in the east was a direct contrast to a brilliant red, orange and yellow sky in the west as the sun began to set that evening. Widespread layers of cirrocumulus clouds may indicate instability in an area, and may move ahead of an advancing weather system. Things were definitely not rosy earlier on this day in the Lake Delhi area, about 36 miles to the northeast, as the dam there on the Maquoketa River was compromised, causing tremendous flooding and damage to people and property.
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