4 August 2025: Sky spectacles, from cloud iridescence to lightning

It’s a good thing I have dogs to walk, because when I’m buried in work or hiding in my writing cave, it’s easy to forget that the skies can be beautiful, and looking at them can be really therapeutic. The dogs got me outside early this evening in time to see convective towers creating pileus clouds, a type of lenticular cloud.

Pileus are short-lived wispy caps that form atop growing storm clouds, above strong updrafts. And I knew from previous experience that with the sun going down behind the building clouds, it was possible those pileus would display some iridescence. Or in the vernacular, they’d look like “rainbow clouds.”

I caught a fleeting and ethereal display of this iridescence as I looked west from Rockledge, Florida. The first couple of photos in the gallery below were shot with iPhone. The second two were of another storm, taken with a Nikon camera and cropped. They show that when the sunlight hits the ice particles forming in the pileus caps, it creates the rainbow effect as the light is diffracted. They’re quite magical.

The storms merged and pushed out a shelf cloud as it was getting dark, so I ran out and got a few photos as this layered, gloomy beast moved across the Space Coast. The heavy rain and lightning followed.

I went out one more time after the storms had mostly passed and shot photos looking east over the Indian River Lagoon. I was surprised at how much cloud-to-ground lightning still sparked as the storms moved over the ocean. There were a few lightning crawlers, too; I missed a couple of good ones, but I included one of the lesser ones here. I cropped all of these lightning photos to show off the intricate and amazing detail in the bolts.

Click on any image to see a larger version.