Sky Diary: the blog

I’m traveling right now, but it’s not what it sounds like. I’m actually dealing with a family crisis and trying to work in the scant time in between. Still, I took a short break today and visited a wonderful model train display. I would say toy trains, because it sounds more fun, but I think the serious train guys might object.

The display is located at Garden Spot Village, a retirement community in New Holland, Pennsylvania. It was open for a couple of hours today during a fall festival. So I spent a few minutes decompressing and imagining myself in the tiny world of the trains through the eye of my iPhone.

This is a laid-back little video. The models range from various gauges traversing sophisticated settings to cute Thomas the Tank Engine trains. The attention to detail is fantastic. If only I’d had more time to capture it all! I suppose the same could be said of life. My thoughts are certainly running that way as I see a dear family member struggling with age and illness.

Treasure the time you have, friends.

It was a beautiful night for a rocket launch this evening in Cocoa, Florida, where I set up a Nikon and a GoPro to capture the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This was a special mission – Inspiration4, the first private human spaceflight mission to orbit. Commissioned by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, it aims to raise awareness for the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. And also, no doubt, to mount a landmark adventure.

The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:02 p.m. EDT. A few clouds made the launch even more beautiful as the rocket lit them during its ascent, and then the sun caught the vehicle and its contrail, creating the “jellyfish” effect one often sees just after sunset or just before dawn. The SpaceX launches are always visually interesting at night for their colorful effects during the journey, especially when captured with a zoom lens, as in this post.

Tonight, I used purely a wide angle lens on the Nikon D7100, my trusty 12-24mm, and I stacked a handful of images to create the still photo. I probably could’ve gotten a cool image just by leaving the shutter open, but I wanted to try it this way. I set the GoPro to shoot in “nightlapse” mode to produce the video.

 

Back when I published the Storm Seekers novels, I made book trailers for FUNNEL VISION and ZAP BANG – but not for TORNADO PINBALL. And I LOVE this book. I was crazy busy, time went by, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, in spite of the challenges involved in teasing to a book that plays like a big-budget movie in my mind.

Well, while I don’t have a special-effects budget, I have lots of tornado footage! And while I’d love to see this book made into a film someday – because we need more good movies about storm chasers – the books and their trailers will have to suffice.

Without further ado, here is the debut of the book trailer for Book 2, TORNADO PINBALL.

About the book

Just when TV shows about storm chasing can’t get any more extreme, along comes a production company with the ultimate exploit: the Bubble, a manned tornado probe. As the reluctant consultant, expert storm chaser Jack Andreas must get the show’s nervous star, failed tour operator Brad Treat, into a twister. But Jack is losing his customary cool as a comedy of errors unfolds. Distracting him is co-star Saffire, a Hollywood actress who is more than she seems, and producer Wynda, who will do anything to make her documentary succeed. The daring star of another show pursues them, desperate for a shot with his own flying machine. As the disasters mount, will Jack be able to launch their device into a tornado?

The sequel to FUNNEL VISION, a Storm Seekers novel, TORNADO PINBALL delivers an unforgettable adventure with action, humor, romance and stunning storms. Learn more on the books page.

Supposedly you can set off fireworks anytime for “agricultural purposes” in Florida, like frightening birds away from fish hatcheries. Seriously — it’s in the law. And these days, you can also shoot them off on July 4 or New Year’s Eve/Day without owning a farm – not that this recent exception has really changed anything. People have been buying and blowing up the big stuff for years whenever they want.

I’m not talking about sparklers; I’m talking about the fireworks that shoot up in the air and explode in a fountain of money. I mean, sparks.

As you might expect, our neighborhoods are full of wild private fireworks displays on the Fourth of July that are loud, beautiful, and terrifying to animals.

I was at a small gathering on a canal in a Satellite Beach neighborhood for this year’s Fourth of July celebration and got to see several of these quasi-legal home displays firsthand. They were certainly pretty.

It was a stormy night, and as the clouds rolled through, I caught timelapse sequences with my GoPro. The result is this fun little video showing just how many fireworks one can see in the middle of a Florida neighborhood on July Fourth.

Duck!

 

Almost every year, I try to capture the blossoming of night-blooming cereus flowers in a timelapse video. These cactus vines produce dinner-plate-size flowers in late spring where I live — central Florida — and each flower blooms just once. The aromatic flower begins to open at sunset and closes at dawn.

Some nights, several flowers bloom at once, making a spectacular display. The cactus vine grows up one of our palm trees, and I’m also trying to get it started on our oak after seeing pictures of an oak in Orlando draped with the giant flowers.

For the timelapse this year, I used a GoPro Hero 8 in timelapse mode. I lit the flowers with a simple LED worklight.

While June 1 wasn’t technically a storm chase, it was our farewell to the 2021 Tornado Alley safari. Alethea Kontis and I didn’t have a whole lot of time for tourism this year, given we were chasing almost the entire trip, so we put aside a few hours on our last day in the Plains for a favorite stop.

First we paused in Hollis, Oklahoma, to grab a couple of photos. I’m fascinated by the old “Busy Corner” gas station there, which still has vintage pumps and a fantastic sign.

 
Then we headed on to visit the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma.

I’ve visited this park a handful of times during my 25 seasons of chasing storms, and I almost always see something new. The visitors’ center was closed (due to Covid, I presume), but the view from Mount Scott is stunning, and over the years, fields of wind turbines have sprouted in the distance. The wildflowers are gorgeous. There are bison and birds. And this was my best visit ever with the prairie dogs, who seemed to be a lot more active on the more accessible side of the road. That doesn’t mean I didn’t cringe when some noisy tourists came and threw junk food at them. Leave the poor prairie dogs be! They’re perfectly happy munching on their flowers and bugs.

I had a nice long lens this time, so I captured some adorable photos, from a single prairie dog enjoying a snack to whole families on alert at their burrows.

 
We ended our park visit with a walk in the Parallel Forest, the remains of a government experiment to plant 20,000 cedar trees in neat rows as a wind block. Time has worn down its angles and lines, but you can still find fascinating views of parallel trees lined along inviting paths.

Goodbye, Tornado Alley, until — I hope — next time.

On some chases, you get the bear. And on other chases, the bear gets you.

You could say Alethea Kontis and I got the bear on May 30 as we chased in New Mexico with Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. We were northeast of Clayton, and the guys got ahead of us as I spotted a critter climbing on a power pole. It appeared to be a young bear, and despite its blond hair, a young black bear. For safety, we stayed in the car as we stopped and filmed the bear for a few minutes. And because we were in the car, I tried to use my phone to film it, so my pictures kind of stink. (Theme of the day.)

By the time we decided to move on, we damn near missed the tornado. So in this sense, the bear kind of got us.

Scott and Dave had stayed with the storm, watching it develop. We pulled up on a dirt road next to them just as they were about to move closer to the developing tornado. We quickly turned around and resumed heading north. We spotted the fleeting tornado, and I got only a glimpse on my wide-angle GoPro dash cam, resulting in – yes – another crappy image when I cropped it later. And unfortunately, we missed better tornadoes that occurred to our east that we were simply unreachable once we got into this area of almost no roads.

We got almost under the rotation, amid ground-scraping clouds and under the threat of hail, which we escaped by heading east. After that, the day was pretty much a car wash. But it was interesting. I’d never seen a bear while chasing storms before!

Roll over a photo below to see the caption, or click on any one to start a slide show of larger images.

 
There’s nothing like waking up in Roswell, New Mexico, and not having time to enjoy all the UFO-related tourist traps. At least Alethea Kontis and I had done so before … but this morning of May 29, we had to get on the road and get up to southeast Colorado to reach our chase target. We were in good company, as a flotilla of other storm chasers also thronged the roads once we got there.

We caravanned with Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison, in Scott’s Xterra, which sports shields to keep out hail, as well as Jason Persoff, whose car has a number of honorable hail dents. Jason was one of the lucky chasers on the Campo, Colorado, tornado in 2010, and our target was in the same area in what he recognized as similar conditions.

 
We ended up north and west of Campo, southwest of Pritchett, keeping an eye on storms that showed little organization. But the models called for better dewpoints to accompany moisture-transporting winds from the south, and when they arrived – bingo! The storm we were watching evolved quickly into a rotating supercell.

 

A wall cloud followed, then a big cone tornado as rain wrapped around the mesocyclone. Yes, it was another “maybenado” of 2021, except enhanced images and other chasers’ reports confirm that we did indeed see a tornado. Hey, even if it was in the murk, I’ll take it.

As we tried to keep up with the storm, we bounced on a dusty gravel road through Colorado canyons, headed south across the Oklahoma border. This is a hilly area, and Alethea and I found a couple of high spots to watch inflow streaming into the storm, which produced one apparent wall cloud after another. In spite of radar showing rotation in just the right spot, and suggestive, ground-scraping cloud features, we saw no other tornadoes.

We all met up on the road again as darkness fell. We stopped on the north side of Boise City, Oklahoma, at the Cimarron Heritage Center, which has a fantastic big dinosaur sculpture that was the perfect foreground for lightning. After fun photography (and a very cool timelapse – check out the video), we ran into other chasers in town, compared notes, and wrapped up what was a really fun chase.

In spite of maybe-nadoes.

 

Roll over any picture to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.

 
How perfect to chase a supercell that looked like an alien invader in Roswell, New Mexico.

On May 28, Alethea Kontis and I hit the road in Childress, Texas, with Jason Persoff, Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. Our first target was the Midland area, but it looked as if the target was shifting south into tough chase territory (rugged hills). And even if Midland had remained the most likely target, the frustrating construction nightmare had us changing direction and heading for eastern New Mexico.

This choice illustrates a typical chaser’s dilemma: Go for the more likely tornado, which may not be that easy to catch or see if it happens because of territory or congestion, or chase the more visible, accessible storms. These days, with so many chasers on the road, I really like secondary targets. And even though we didn’t see a tornado, I am thrilled with what we saw in New Mexico.

 

We were already behind the eight-ball by the time we neared Roswell, with ongoing rotating storms emerging from the higher elevations. Yet we were greeted by an eerie sight – blowing dust, gustnadoes from a dying storm to the north, strange green light and a beast of a supercell in front of us. It was like driving into a sci-fi movie.

 

The storm was full of hail, and Scott and Dave went ahead in their well-shielded car as we dropped south. Except a big hailstone bounced off their hail shield and took out a side mirror. The rest of us hung back but still got into some fun smaller hail and took photos of baseball-size hailstones we found by the side of the road. The trees in that area were shredded by the bombardment.

 

Finally, we saw multiple funnel clouds and were treated to an insanely orange sunset and a double rainbow. The chase concluded with beautiful lightning amid the mammatus at Artesia. And Alethea and I made one more stop on our way back to Roswell for the night, capturing spectacular stars above the retreating lightning storms.

Not bad for a roundabout 559-mile chase.

Roll over a photo below to see the caption, or click on any image to start a slide show of larger pictures.

 
After a very late night chasing storms in the northern Texas Panhandle and traveling north to the I-70, Alethea Kontis and I were happy to wake up in the target area on May 26. But when we looked out the window of our hotel in Colby, Kansas, we realized we weren’t going to have a leisurely start. A supercell to our west was already producing beautiful mammatus (so much mammatus this year!), and it was spinning. It was hard to see behind the retail buildings, but we knew we had to chase it.

 

And oh, what a chase it was! This mothership supercell was not only spinning but absolutely beautiful. (The timelapse video says it all.)

This kind of structure is rare — and almost unheard of at 11 a.m.! I was enraptured, and we followed it north of Colby for a while until we had to make a choice and reposition for potentially tornadic storms later in the day.

Those started early, too – one too far southeast of us to catch, and more up in Nebraska. We met up with Bill Hark and Jason Persoff in Oakley and debated which way to go. And ended up not seeing any of the tornadoes. That said, we finished off the day with beautiful skies anyway: bubbling convection, a glorious sunset, and staccato lightning as the moon rose over the storms.

 

It’s hard to be disappointed in a day that offers such a visual feast.

Roll over a photo to see a caption, or click on any picture to start a slide show of larger images.