Monsoon!

I have lived most of my life in the desert southwest where the air is usually clear and dry. Every summer, usually around Independence Day, the flow of the atmosphere shifts bringing humidity. The heat of the day and instability in the atmosphere generates thunderstorms.

You wouldn't think that someone who loves astronomy as much as I do would welcome our monsoon season, but I do. The clouds pretty much ruin astronomy in July and August. The weather is so bad that the professional observatories in the area usually shut down for maintenance. Even though the monsoons are bad for astronomy they are celebrated. I suspect that most people who have not lived in the desert would understand how everyone here gets excited about just the possibility of rain.

This year's thunderstorms in Tucson kicked off on Monday. Friday was another active day. Here's a time-lapse movie from Friday showing how it looked from the University of Arizona:

It was a pretty good storm. Parts of town got 2-3 inches of rain and the temperature at the airport dropped about 25 degrees. We have yet to get any measurable rain at our place (our time will come, hopefully soon), but this evening we had a wonderful lightning storm.

It was my first time with lightning photography in years. In fact, the last time I shot lightning I was shooting with film (Yes, I'm that old). Needless to say, I am pretty happy with how things turned out.

The trick to lightning photography is to make sure it is far enough away to be safe and that it's dark enough for timed exposures. Tonight was the perfect combination. Lightning is bright enough that setting your camera's speed to something slow, like 100, is perfect. It allows you to take long exposures without overexposing, while giving you plenty of opportunity to catch the lightning in the act.

Personally I like Nature's fireworks a whole lot more than the man-made fireworks of a few days ago. I managed to get a few shots that I liked and I have posted the good ones here.

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To get even more in a shot individual exposures can be combined with a program like StarStaX. Here's the two photos above, and another that had just a little bit of lightning. The resulting image is even nicer.

 Here are a few more individual frames that still look pretty good.

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And, if you made it down this far, here are a couple more stacked images. First 4 frames stacked:

And then 8 frames stacked:

I hope to shoot more lightning before the summer rains end and, if I do, you'll be seeing the pics here.