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I really don’t love chasing storms traveling at highway speeds, especially when they’re packed with hail. I’m hail-avoidant on a good day, thanks to previous experiences with being pummeled by hail, and with a new car? Well, perhaps I’m even more cautious.

So when Alethea Kontis and I traveled south of Limon, Colorado, on May 23, 2021, to meet a rotating storm hurtling north, we had to make a decision. And personally, I didn’t want to try to keep up while playing dodgeball with what was quickly becoming a line of hail-filled storms. Some folks saw tornadoes who pursued it. Some didn’t. And some took a hail bath while they were chasing it.

We opted to try to catch storms forecast to form farther east, but those storms were never that vigorous or organized in spite of screaming-fast surface winds. Still, we saw a funnel at the end of the original line, and I wondered if there was any circulation on the ground.

The day was redeemed by a fantastic lightning show at Burlington, Colorado. The timelapse in the video is really nifty.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on an image to start a slide show of larger pictures.

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May 21 is what you’d probably call a storm-chasing bust, or as I jokingly call it, a “wet bust,” as we did see storms — just nothing spectacular.

We started and ended the day in Sidney, Nebraska, and any storms that formed were screaming north at highway speeds. It was almost impossible to keep up with them. Perhaps the only highlight was seeing some of the pretty rock formations of western Nebraska silhouetted against the storm-tempered light.

I do have a few photos from the day. Roll over one to see its caption, or click on one to see a slide show of larger images.

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May 20, 2021, Alethea Kontis and I targeted northeastern Colorado, hoping for supercells. Bill Hark joined us for much of the chase. Storms took a long time to get going, and when they did, the lack of roads made it difficult to be on the “right” side of them … but we had a beautiful view of hail and rainbows (or hailbows) from the west.

We also picked up some very large hail on the road, up to three inches in diameter — hail I was very grateful not to drive through.

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What an extraordinary day of seeing nature’s magic in action! Alethea Kontis and I started our storm chase on May 17, 2021, in Seminole, Texas, where we watched clouds bubbling on the dryline. Aggressively growing turkey towers (as seen in the video) suggested that storms were in the offing.

Jason Persoff found us by the side of the road. He was chasing with his son Kai, and we all headed north of town to watch the developing storms.

 

The first ones seemed to deflate quickly, but soon a small LP (low-precipitation) storm began to dominate the area around Brownfield. While a nice cone tornado occurred in the line of storms farther south, this one produced what was essentially a dust whirl under a nub of a funnel. Even though we were filming it, we didn’t see the whirling dust – probably because there was so much other dust in the way.

There’s a lot of timelapse in my video, and this spinning storm sometimes resembled a UFO descending upon the Earth.

 

Brownfield literally has a lot of brown fields, and interestingly, their color was reflected in the bases of the storms. So while I always enhance photographs to a point — I’m leaning more toward artistic photos these days rather than the flat, documentary style — those brown and rust colors are pretty much true to life.

 

The storm moved into the south side of Lubbock and produced a long, white funnel that was just shy of stirring up circulation on the ground — i.e., no tornado.

We watched the storm as it became disorganized but still produced a glorious display of convection, lightning and mammatus clouds at sunset. All in all, it was an exhilarating chase day with lots of photo opportunities.

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May 16, 2021, didn’t start as the most promising of storm chases. Alethea Kontis and I targeted an area southwest of Amarillo and played with pretty storms, photographing falling hail and mammatus. We didn’t see much structure, though, and in search of a break, we stopped at a gas station in Hereford. I thought I saw what looked like a wall cloud on a storm to the south and figured we’d take a look after we finished our rest stop. When we got back in the car, I saw the storm had multiple tornado reports on it – all for one, pretty little tornado.

 
Needless to say, we rushed headlong down to Earth, Texas, to check out the storm. Even on the way, the view was spectacular. The sky filled with bubbly mammatus clouds over a perfect LP (low-precipitation) supercell, spinning madly in the late afternoon light. We found the perfect farm road and photographed and timelapsed the storm until after dark. It was hard to narrow down the photos. And the video is totally mesmerizing.

The storm didn’t produce another tornado, but it was uniquely beautiful, especially with the mammatus, which slid away as dusk fell.

One thing that stays true about storm chasing, even in my twenty-fifth season (yes, you read that right), is that it’s really hard to get enough sleep on the road, let alone enough time to publish all the photos and videos I shoot. We drive constantly, and there’s not a lot of time to sit at a computer for hours processing photos and video. To be brutally honest, I still have some chases for which I’ve never posted the photos in previous years. And this year, though I am doing my best to stay current, I’ve already fallen behind. So although I’m writing this on May 20, I’m dating this post May 16, 2021, which is the day the event occurred.

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May 15, Alethea Kontis and I started the day in Shamrock, Texas, with a visit to the Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn, which we’d photographed the night before. And I learned that Elvis ate there once!

We headed north and west from there, aiming for the western Oklahoma panhandle, with the idea that we could go north into Colorado or catch a storm right there … even though there are precious few roads.

After we hung around Boise City, Oklahoma, in the panhandle for much of the afternoon, storms started to form on the high ground from New Mexico up to Colorado. We could see moisture advecting into our area and storms began to form here, too, in loose clusters. We popped north of the border into Colorado as the lightning began to heat up, photographing hail and rain shafts and the occasional bolt.

Soon enough, we dropped back south into Oklahoma and stayed ahead of the barely moving storms, capturing the structure and lightning. Especially appealing for photography are all the derelict structures in this area, evoking the hard times of the Dust Bowl. They’re so appealing, storm chasers were parked in front of most of them, but we got a few atmospheric photos anyway.

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Storm chasing 2021 has begun! This is my 25th season chasing storms, though last spring was the first I spent no time in Tornado Alley, thanks to the pandemic. While the world is far from normal, my friend Alethea Kontis and I are vaccinated, taking precautions and on the road.

Today, May 14, was the first taste of a chase for us this season after driving out from Florida. We paused to take photos of golden wheat and a wind farm at Oklaunion, Texas, and kept an eye on storms in the Texas Panhandle.

We caught a little lightning in Shamrock, Texas, home of the beautifully restored Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn. While I’m still hoping to get a truly great lightning photo here someday, this fun little timelapse video and the photos were atmospheric, at least.

I’m already sleep deprived. More later! Meanwhile, you can roll over each image below to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.

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On Florida’s Space Coast, we like to say rockets get out of here in a hurry. This GoPro “nightlapse” timelapse makes the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Starlink satellites on April 28, 2021, appear to be REALLY fast. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice if the trees weren’t in the way, but the challenge of launch photography is knowing where the rocket is going to come up, especially if you’re shooting from a new location. Yes, you can sort of figure it out, but it’s still possible to be just a little bit off.

It was a really windy night, so the palm trees were blurred in my photos. The moon was just beyond full, so it showed up nicely in the fisheye photo.

In this picture, I played around with stacking just a few photos. That’s the streak shot here with the nice blue background and really short star trails.

Here’s the photo I shot with my 10.5mm fisheye lens. This is one long exposure – 257 seconds – featuring the launch on one side and the moon on the other. I cropped it a little to get the strong horizontal shape.

 
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted NASA’s Crew-2 to the International Space Station from Kennedy Space Center at 5:49 a.m. EDT on April 23, 2021, with a Crew Dragon capsule. We had a chance to see the launch from the NASA causeway, on the Cape Canaveral side.

The predawn launch was perfectly timed for lovely light effects as the capsule and the booster it shed (which subsequently landed on the drone ship) headed to the horizon in parallel. The contrail left a swirl of noctilucent cloud in the early morning sky.

This is the second crew launched to the ISS aboard a Falcon 9. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, will spend six months aboard the space station.

There’s also new hardware aboard the capsule, including science experiments.

GoPro timelapse video (in nightlapse mode) and photographs shot with two Nikon cameras are featured in the video. You can see some of the photographs in the gallery below.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

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One thing you can say about this past year is that we’ve learned how to become travelers in our own backyard. Early in our self-imposed lockdown, I decided to get a bird feeder set up.

We have a pretty bird-friendly yard. It’s small but has a lot of cover – or what one might call a miniature Florida jungle – and we don’t use pesticides. So I thought we could create a little bird oasis and get some entertainment to boot.

After months of refinements, adding a second feeder, and endlessly manipulating the setup with arching supports and baffles to keep the rodents from helping themselves, we’ve seen some wonderful little visitors to our backyard.

 

Winter in Florida is always a good time to see birds, and as they migrate up north in the spring, we catch some beauties.

Just in the last two days, I’ve seen more variety than ever — rose-breasted grosbeaks, painted buntings, even a bird new to me — a northern parula. I had to look it up.

Hummingbirds have also been frequent visitors to the flowers around the feeder, and one of my favorite captures was of the moment when a bee flew into a resting hummingbird’s face and the bird told it to buzz off.

 
Maybe the variety of birds isn’t as vast as what one might see at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s pretty exciting for the backyard.

P.S. Because some have asked, to keep out squirrels and other rodents, we use a Squirrel Buster bird feeder, with a long, arching support hook and a wide baffle like this one. The small, round feeder requires a different, rounded baffle to keep out clever rodents.

Here’s a gallery of some of the wonderful visitors we’ve had in 2021. Roll over an image below to see its caption, and click on any photo below to start a slide show of larger images.

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