A sunny, windy day on Cocoa Beach provided a beautiful backdrop for the second day of the Air Dot Show on Sunday, April 12. That is, an air show, headlined by the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels.

Huge crowds showed up on the barrier island, concentrated in the main show area in Cocoa Beach. I was at the house of some friends a bit south of that area, but we still had a very cool view from the beach. I shot photos with my Nikon Z8 and a 200-500 zoom lens – an older lens that requires an adapter to work with the Z-mount. It’s also heavy as heck, so my arms got a workout shooting thousands of photos.

Among the other aircraft featured: the B-52 Stratofortress, the F-16, and a plane and helicopters demonstrating refueling in the air from the 920th Rescue Wing. These are some of my favorite images from the day.

Click on any photo to start a slide show of larger images.

I’ve just come back from a dream bucket-list trip to Iceland. Of course, the problem with any “bucket list” item is that you’re supposed to check it off. It’s done. It’s over. But I would love to go back to the dreamy skies and dramatic landscapes, which my husband and I experienced in all of their winter beauty, from snow-frosted black lava rocks to sparkling ice crystals to frozen waterfalls.

My No. 1 sub-item for this bucket-list trip was seeing the Northern Lights. I’ve seen them before from the U.S., during the May 10 and May 11, 2024, solar storm displays when Alethea and I took a detour from storm chasing to find them. While the pictures then showed a lot more colors than what I captured in Iceland, to the naked eye, they weren’t as vivid in terms of actual light. Up near the Arctic Circle — while the color was still somewhat faint — the features of the aurora were very much visible to the naked eye. The lights were almost like eerie self-illuminated clouds.

I saw aurora on multiple nights. We happened to be in Reykjavik when the big geomagnetic storm occurred, just before our tour began. Good news and bad news: We were in Iceland for the big event, but the aurora were competing with the city lights. However, they were spectacular anyway, and I’ll do a separate post about those two nights.

What’s amazing to me is that even if the parameters aren’t particularly promising, this far north, a big show can happen anyway. And that’s what we got on November 15 (into the wee hours of November 16) at Wilderness Center, a remote hotel set on an old farm in east-central Iceland. Framed by a river valley, the display was vivid and came in (at least) three waves. I only gave up because I was freezing and I wanted to go home with all my fingers. (Not really a joke – I think I was a bit frost-nipped.)

Here are some photos from the night, and check out the video as well. It moves from GoPro time-lapses of the early show and then time-lapses from stills shot with my Nikon Z8. I used the intervalometer setting for some of these and just manually shot the last sequence because I was in a hurry and didn’t want to waste time setting it up and miss part of the display. So occasionally there’s a wee bump, but the display was so amazing, I have no complaints.

You can click on any image to see a larger version and view the photos as slides. Stay tuned for more posts from this wonderful trip through a photographer’s paradise!

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.

It’s been a weird summer here on Florida’s Space Coast. We’ve had weeks with no rain at all during the height of the supposed storm season, though this past week, we finally had some relief in the form of two gully-washer days in a row.

Tonight a couple of isolated storms popped up to our west, moving my way, and I realized I might have my first chance this summer for a local lightning chase. So I headed out to a favorite spot in Rockledge to capture the storms at sunset. For a little while, the storm popped with lightning almost continuously. Then it sent out what looked like an outflow boundary and clouds got in the way of my view.

 
I moved west through Cocoa to a spot on the St. Johns River, hoping to get some cloud-to-ground lightning. As the storm weakened, there were a few bolts that I was pretty sure I missed. But I was luckier than I thought, and I was able to salvage a few so-so shots in editing. One was a blown-out bolt that was pretty spectacular, especially cropped as a vertical.

Here are a few shots from tonight. You can click on each thumbnail to see a larger version.

 

I almost missed my chance to film a time-lapse of the night-blooming cereus flowers this year. These are the gorgeous flowers that form on a cactus vine that is now crawling up a palm tree, an oak tree (on purpose – I’ve seen pictures of a spectacular one in central Florida and hope to get there someday), and around my chaotic, currently weedy deck garden. Each flower lasts only one night.

I missed the “big night” – there’s always one night when many, many of the blooms explode – because I returned from chasing storms the day after. But the blooms do appear for a while, popping up here and there. Until they don’t.

I’ve made several of these videos that you can see on my YouTube channel (please subscribe!), including a mini documentary that will tell you a little more about the blooms. This year’s video focuses on the mesmerizing beauty of one of these flowers as it opens. Check it out.

 
We’re back from Tornado Alley! This trip with my storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis went all too quickly, even though it was two and a half weeks. I sometimes wish I had the freedom to chase for a couple of months at a time, as some chasers do, but I still have a day job (editing books) and a fun job (writing books) and a husband and dogs and a life at home. So I enjoy the trip, and then I look for lightning when I get back home to Florida.

We saw five or six tornadoes, but most of them were in the “murknadoes” category — far away or difficult to see. The best tornado photo I got was probably a shot of a skinny little thing in Missouri, where I’d never seen a tornado before. And why “or six”? The last one was so murky, it’s super hard to see in my video, even though I think it’s there. All of this is to illustrate why seeing tornadoes is not really the most important thing to me when I chase storms, though I’m still frustrated when I miss them. Especially because our chase crew missed a couple of really photogenic tornadic storms due to bad decisions or poor timing. That’s the way the weather works sometimes and the way chasing works as well. Regardless, we still found beautiful storms to photograph.

One of the best things about this season — my 29th — was getting together with good friends whom we’ve barely seen in the past few years. Chasing together was a huge amount of fun. We hit thirteen states and drove more than 9500 miles, so we packed in a lot of adventure.

Alethea and I did several video updates from the road. You can check them out in this YouTube playlist. I’ll be posting more pictures and videos as I go through everything. I certainly got a lot of photos, and I can’t wait to share them with you. Thanks again to everyone who gave so generously to our gas fund! Stay tuned for more reports as I process all the images.

 

 
Are there good-luck foods when we chase storms? Alethea and I like to toast with the cheese rounds I make and bring from home. But I also think Texas-shaped waffles are fun, at the very least, and I love a good Allsup’s burrito to fuel the chase. We had both of these on May 22, 2025. And a very lucky storm.

With our chaser friends — Jason Persoff, Scott McPartland, Dave Lewison and George Kourounis — we headed to an area west of Dallas, Texas, and caught up to an unassuming storm that soon began to spin. It was a bit frothy-looking at first, but soon it developed a mini mothership appearance, and the striations and stacked plates became smoother and more pronounced as the day wore on.

We got fantastic pictures with the sun shooting out rays behind the storm when we stopped on the northeast side of Possum Kingdom Lake. Then we had to circumnavigate the LP, or low-precipitation, supercell, catching up to it at Palo Pinto.

This amazing spinning supercell and a profusion of colorful wildflowers made for a visual feast and one of the most beautiful chases of our trip.

Click on any image to see a bigger photo and start a slide show.

The best part about chasing, especially when the storms let you down, is hanging out with friends. By May 19, 2025, Alethea and I had met up with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, George Kourounis and Jason Persoff. After a yummy barbecue lunch in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, we headed south toward the Red River, where a storm headed over the border into Texas, dumping huge hail along the way.

 

We avoided the hail and ended up getting our best views from behind the storm as it moved west. A spectacular anvil with pouchy mammatus caught the sunset light, so we stopped near athletic fields in Ardmore to get some shots.

The puddles offered a great opportunity for reflective photography as the colors got more dramatic. Then they shifted and changed and became more muted as the sun sank below the horizon and the storm moved off to the east. The nice sunset photos were our consolation prize after a somewhat frustrating chase.

Click on any image to see a bigger photo and start a slide show.

Maybe I should have taken the pancake printer as an omen.

The pancake printer is just one of many breakfast phenomena one encounters in Tornado Alley hotels, and it’s probably better than the make-your-own-waffle machines in terms of safety and mess. But waffle machines can do shapes, and I have yet to see a pancake in the shape of Texas.

Still, I named a fictional Kansas town Pancake in my Storm Seekers novels. And southern Kansas was where our troupe headed first on May 18, 2025, positioning ourselves between two storm targets. Which, my friends, is almost always an error – or at least it is if you hang out too long, waiting for things to happen, leaving you far from both targets should one of them fire.

 

But we did have fun at the Casey’s in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where lots of storm chasers had gathered. There were so many amusing cars and cool license plates (see the video). It was a major chaser convergence.

Finally, when a nice storm formed along the dryline southwest of us in Oklahoma, we went after it, but we were already too late. It spawned a tornado we didn’t see, then weakened.

Still, it had lovely structure at sunset, and I got a couple of decent photos, which I consider the mark of a good day. It might not have been a great one, but that’s the way storm chasing rolls sometimes.

To start a slide show of the photos, click on any one below.

Alethea and I had a target of eastern Missouri in mind May 16. We met up with friends in Chester, Illinois: Dave Lewison, George Kourounis and Scott McPartland. We crossed the river to intercept a line of storms coming toward us. Soon, the tail-end Charlie looked quite promising on radar. And along the way, we saw spectacular mammatus above us.

The land is pretty flat in much of this area, but trees offered a challenge to viewing. South of Zadock, Alethea and I found a clearing and watched the storm approach. It showed signs of rotation but no obvious tornado at this time – 3:37 p.m. We watched the storm go past us and tried to reposition.

Then we got on Route 57 to reposition – a tactical mistake as we headed east, given we couldn’t get off the divided highway when we DID see a tornado! We spotted it through the trees west of Bertrand, Missouri, at 5:14 p.m. Alethea caught a bit of it on video as I drove.

But the show wasn’t over yet. We moved north to pursue other storms and stopped at Morley. While I eyed a wall cloud, the storm produced a tornado south of Oran in a different part of the storm that took us by surprise. Conveniently, right in front of us. Ha! It was a very pretty, slender funnel that produced a dust whirl on the ground.

Afterward, our attention turned to a fat rotating wall cloud moving to our northeast. Partially obscured by rain, a white tornado formed. I got shots around 6:46 p.m. CDT. The storms sped away from us, so we stopped to enjoy sunset west of Bell City, Missouri.

It was time to reposition to Tornado Alley. We made our way west through Missouri and the dark skies of the Mark Twain National Forest. We couldn’t resist stopping to try to capture the stars and possibly sprites above the storms. Instead, I caught fireflies and possibly a touch of the aurora reported that night. We also saw an eerie white shaft of light that cut across the sky. There was initial speculation the next day that it was a “STEVE” space weather phenomenon, but we learned that the effect came from a spacecraft. The upper stage of a Chinese rocket performed a fuel dump after a launch.

There’s always magic if you keep looking up.

Here’s a gallery of photos from the day. Click on any one to start a slide show of larger images.