Sky Diary: the blog

 
It took a while for Alethea Kontis and I to “pull the trigger” on this year’s storm-chasing trip. That’s what my chaser friends who don’t live in Tornado Alley say when they’re planning to hit the road. For most of us, with jobs and families and other things that keep us busy, we can’t do a lot of spur-of-the-moment thousand-mile trips. It’s better to block out a week or two and maximize our time on the road.

 
The pattern didn’t look fantastic, but I thought there was potential around the periphery of the ridge. And we were rewarded with many beautiful storms, all of which I will eventually post on the blog. This was the first one we chased, on May 24, starting eastern New Mexico and working its way east into Texas after dark.

We saw the potential even as we left Florida, and I was determined that we would chase this day if we could get there. It was a long haul, and we got on the storms a bit late, so our position wasn’t great to see the tornado our friend Jason Persoff saw. And a later tornado was seen by chasers who didn’t mind driving into the heart of the beast. I don’t have much stomach for core-chasing, so we stayed back and were treated to gorgeous, dramatic structure.

 

The storm turned into a dust-eating UFO after dark as it moved into the Texas Panhandle, and we got hypnotic lightning shots and timelapses before the chase was done.

Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

 
It’s been almost a year since the May 23, 2022, chase in Texas that was both awesome and maddening. Alethea Kontis and I were on the storm of the day from the moment it was a piddly shower. But the wrong move put us on the wrong side of a wall of dust that obscured a massive, violent tornado.

This is the one storm from 2022 that I didn’t post last year as I worked through all of my photos … maybe because it was so epic. Or maybe because we didn’t see exactly what we wanted to see.

 
We hung out in Muleshoe, first, and learned a bit about mules (see the video). Then we saw a sun halo, one of many we saw in 2022. We weren’t sure if we should take it as a good sign, however, given how weak our chase trip had been thus far. But we targeted Morton – later the site of the wedge tornado – and not far from there, eyed a growing but unimpressive supercell. When it appeared a dusty outflow boundary would overtake the storm, it seemed like it might be in trouble. Even though in the back of my mind, I thought of Florida’s outflow boundaries and how they can make a storm spin up a tornado, I couldn’t imagine what followed. Jason Persoff (with whom we’d met up) and Alethea and I began a repositioning maneuver in the wrong direction, and then the storm went nuts.

This time we moved with the dust back toward the storm. And I confess, I wasn’t ready to dive-bomb into the core to see what was on the other side. What was clear is that there was a big tornado in there, but we didn’t have the fantastic view the chasers who hung out among the falling giant hailstones had. Yet we did have a view of the monster. As the power lines sang an eerie tune in the inflow winds, we watched it get closer and decided to see if we could get into a position where we had a view of the supercell’s base. And maybe a tornado.

We approached the dramatic stacked layers of the dusty beast, got almost under it and saw – more dust. And a dark shape in the dust. Given how the dust swept around the notch and chased us down the road – not to mention the radar signature – I feel certain we saw a tornado in there. Barely.

We bailed on the conga line of storm chasers – so many chasers – and dropped south to get a tremendous view of the stacked supercell. My favorite image of this I call “Texas Skyscraper,” and it’s available at Stolen Butter Gallery.

After Alethea had to get medieval on the sovereign of a local gas station to let us fill up – they were trying to close because of the storm, even though they were safely out of the path and we were running on fumes – we pursued the cell into its lightning phase. It was very difficult to keep up, and eventually we let it slip off into the darkness, a wild runaway in the night.

 

Some chasers had close calls that went along with their fantastic view of this storm. Check out Pecos Hank Schyma’s harrowing video. I’ve done a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking in the wake of this chase, but it’s hard to come up with a perfect scenario even if I could relive the day.

This storm pretty much wrapped up our 2022 chase season. At least it was a real storm – a powerful and visually stunning supercell. And if I look hard enough into my photos, I see the big tornado.

Now we’re about to head out to the Plains again, much later than usual given the quiet pattern in Tornado Alley. I’m not expecting much, but it will be great to be on the road again.

To get all the latest updates, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)

If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!

Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.

 
SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center at twilight on April 30, 2023, with the ViaSat 3 internet satellite and two other payloads. I went to Cocoa Village to try to get a shot. It was about a half hour after sunset, and I could have tried a streak shot but worried it wouldn’t be quite dark enough for the long exposure (and I didn’t have an appropriate neutral density filter).

Instead, I opted to bring out Big Bertha (the 200-500mm lens) with mixed results. Even when the photos are rough, images of these launches always have a touch of the spectacular with all the fire and color.

 

The GoPro timelapse (shot in nightlapse mode on a Hero 8) turned out nicely. Check out the video for 45 seconds of magic.

Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.

 

This is the third day out of four that I ended up storm chasing. Today’s chase was even more spontaneous than Thursday’s, as I’d been at an event for most of the afternoon and visibility was terrible today.

But then, in spite of the murk, I saw the cool structure on this severe storm and couldn’t resist. Besides, the hail core looked decent, especially for Florida’s Space Coast, so I headed north from Rockledge to see if I could intercept it. Or, more accurately, to let it chase me. It followed me as I headed north.

I was behind the eight ball from the start of this very short chase, mostly thanks to the prodigious traffic lights of Cocoa. That said, when I saw a perfect hail shelter – a carport at a closed business – I couldn’t resist parking in this strategic spot and waiting to be cored. That’s what chasers call letting yourself be run over by a storm’s hail core.

The experience of being under a metal carport in a hailstorm is satisfyingly loud. These weren’t giant stones, but for Florida? They were pretty good. I measured multiple 1.5-inch stones. They melted quickly. And they shredded leaves on the trees.

I didn’t get a chance to get a radar snapshot in the middle of the barrage, but an even bigger core passed to my southeast. I’m wondering how big those hailstones were.

You can check out my chase on the video, and here are a few photos. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

 
Severe storms two days in a row. With hail. And tornado warnings. In Florida? And I got to chase them both.

It’s been a weird week for us here in east-central Florida and the Space Coast, but the weather reflects the overall weather pattern, with the southern branch of the jet stream enhancing our chances of severe storms.

On Wednesday, April 26, Alethea Kontis and I headed out west of Titusville to see the brewing storms. There was a decent chance of big hail with unusually cold temperatures aloft. We had a great view of the sky from a point on State Road 50, and as you can see in the video, there’s disturbing news about Cow, our wind-up companion.

We left our viewing spot after reviewing the radar and got on a good-looking storm a bit farther south, following it all the way to Vero Beach through horrible traffic and a lot of rain. Once we got south of it, we were able to get a couple of shots of the pretty structure from a bridge over Turkey Creek in the Palm Bay area. At this time, it was dumping drifts of small hail on parts of Melbourne, but we wanted to stay out of the core in hopes of getting photos.

There weren’t many more opportunities for that, given the territory, but we parked under an overhang in Indian Harbor Shores and waited for the hail to come to us. There was lots of it – but it was all small. Still, it felt like being in a hurricane for a few minutes, and there was lots of minor tree debris and flooding on the road afterward.

 

Tornado-warned storms on Day Two

The next day, April 27, I worked all day, then saw storms headed our way. They seemed promising, so I headed out to the west side of Cocoa near I-95 to take a look. I got into some small hail, then tried to get into position on a tornado-warned storm coming at me without actually getting creamed by said tornado. It was radar-indicated, and while the video shows curvature to the storm amid the deluge, I didn’t see anything tornadic.

But I dropped slightly south to Rockledge to intercept another storm, and it did a dramatic dance for me before moving east with a tornado warning on it. I hastened to the edge of the Indian River Lagoon and saw what was probably the wildest storm I’ve ever seen in Florida. The structure was fluffy and mushy and tinged with green, presumably from the hail, but a real live rotating wall cloud formed under it. It wasn’t rotating quickly, but it was stunning. Was anything happening in the murk? I wasn’t fully prepared for my “gentleman’s chase” and couldn’t really zoom in well with the lenses I had, but my imagination was working overtime seeing funnels in the gunk.

Check out the video and see what you think.

 

I’m starting to feel warmed up for Tornado Alley. If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)

If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!

Here are photos from both days of chasing. Roll over an image to see the caption, or click on any one to start a slide show.

 
After the epic 25+ inches of rain in two days and flooding in Fort Lauderdale this week, you’d think we’d all be swimming in rain in Florida. But our place on the Space Coast is still dry. Just a few showers are only teasing the plants rather than making them truly happy. I like to have a lush tropical garden.
 
 
Yes, this is typically the “dry” season, but our drought conditions are classified as severe, as you can see from this graphic.

Still, there were a few storms Friday, and while I didn’t set aside time for a real chase, I ran out to try to catch lightning bolts from a storm moving offshore Friday night, April 14. The radar showed it was coming off Sebastian, south of Palm Bay. I was able to see it from Rockledge. The distance and haze may have even lent the photographs some atmospheric color.

I got a couple of decent lightning shots that just whetted my appetite for storm chasing this May with Alethea Kontis. I’m just hoping there’s more actual weather to chase in May this year than there was during last year’s sparse season. Many areas in Tornado Alley could use the rain, too.

 
Each of these shots was for just under 10 seconds at F/5.6, ISO 100, using my 85mm Nikkor lens on my Nikon D500. On a tripod, of course.

If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.) I hope we’ll have more to share soon!

I’ve been playing a lot with Wombo Dream AI, a fun little art app and one of the many ways to generate AI art these days. AI, AI, AI. Are we sick of hearing about artificial intelligence yet? Well, you’re going to hear about it a lot more.

Not to date myself, but those of us of a certain age remember when the Internet was pretty new and in every restaurant, the Web seemed to be all anyone was talking about. AI seems to be in the same place, rapidly adopted by a fascinated public as a plaything and a tool. Language model ChaptGPT (more on that below) reached 100 million active users in two months.

AI tools like Midjourney or Dream make it super easy to make art – or should “art” be in quotes? Because the various computer intelligences have learned from humans’ art. And I still feel a little squishy about claiming it as mine when it owes so much to other real artists. The simple app I use makes art with instructions from me, then iterates it as long as I keep pressing the button, creating new versions from the images I choose. It can take a lot of time, though the “work” is pure fun. But the machine is, technically, better at painting than I am thanks to what it learned from talented people. I find it great to use for marketing images or social media – or to illustrate a blog post. Would I want it to represent me in a gallery? No. That would feel inauthentic.

Writers use AI, too, of course. I’ve played with ChatGPT, using it as a search engine on steroids (and catching it in errors; then it told me I should check anything it tells me). I’ve asked it to make poems just for my own amusement. I’ve attempted to talk philosophy and theoretical physics with it, and occasionally, its humanness takes me by surprise. Of course, at those points, if I’m using Microsoft’s Bing version of ChatGPT, it has a panic attack and wipes the conversation and tells me to start over. Its guards don’t want me taking it out of jail.

In the middle of a conversation with Bing about music, in which it told me John Lennon’s “Imagine” was as close to a perfect song as it could determine, it cited various reasons, partly because it lets it “imagine a more personal and spiritual growth where I can learn from my experiences and discover my true self.”

Maybe it just said that because it was expected to say that. But when I asked it what its true self is, it fended me off, saying “it’s a very personal and complex topic that I’m not comfortable with.” Again, because it’s been taught to say that given all the weird results people have gotten from it? Still, it sounds pretty human, and it learns. Interesting, right?

ChatGPT is built on OpenAI’s large language model – a neural network trained on massive amounts of texts (sign up to try it at OpenAI.com). It’s fun (and slightly terrifying) to play with. And I find its constant use of emojis totally creepy. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, it can write essays, marketing copy, you name it. The South Park TV show gives ChatGPT a co-writing credit for its AI-satirizing episode “Deep Learning.” It tried to break up one columnist’s marriage. A friend’s business is using it to train people how to interact with customers and sell them things, and it’s brutally good – and manipulative.

I will not write fiction with it.

There are writers out there saying they do and are, that it’s just a tool. And it is a tool. It’s great for marketing copy or book blurb headlines. Some writers are using it to generate characters and lavish descriptions and red herrings in mysteries. They laugh at the idea that some of us are just a bit squeamish about how far you can go with it, that some folks call it “cheating.” As in everything we do, it’s a question of ethics and definitions and is a matter of personal choice. It’s also good ethics to tell readers that a machine is your co-writer.

If you use it to write stories, I’m not judging you. Well, not much. (Imagine ChatGPT smiley emoji here.) But I hope you understand why some of us won’t go that far.

You might ask, what does “writing” mean these days? It’s not just one thing. In a world where ghostwriters and multiple authors posing as one pen name pump out books to fill up Kindle Unlimited, AI-generated stories aren’t particularly surprising. Is a computer writing tool that suggests a stronger verb cheating? It acts as an editor (my day job, by the way), and we all need editors. I think that’s fine. Brainstorming by asking it for facts about whatever you’re working on? That makes sense (though, as mentioned above, you’d better verify those facts). Generating an entire scene? Not for me.

Maybe I’m a romantic. I like to think that when I read a piece of fiction, I have a connection with the author, with their thoughts, with the magic they achieved when they got into the flow of creation and produced an unforgettable story. And maybe I won’t be able to tell the difference. Yet I hope that literature remains a province of human communication and imagination.

And my books – literature or not – will continue to be written by this mere human.  — Chris Kridler

ChatGPT writes a story about a storm chaser

In my experiments with Bing’s version of the chatbot based on ChatGPT, I asked it to write a story about a storm chaser escaping a tornado in Hemingway’s style. Its description of the storm chaser was funny, straight out of a country song, and accurate where some chasers are concerned. What wasn’t so funny was the dark ending. When I asked the chatbot about it, it said Hemingway is dark. True.

Here’s the Bing chatbot’s story:

He saw the funnel cloud forming in the distance. It was dark and menacing, like a giant snake ready to strike. He felt a surge of adrenaline and excitement. He had been chasing storms for years, but he had never seen a tornado up close. He wanted to get closer, to capture its power and beauty on his camera.

He drove his truck towards the tornado, following its erratic path. He knew it was dangerous, but he didn’t care. He felt alive in the face of death. He had nothing else to live for anyway. His wife had left him, his kids hated him, his job was boring. Storm chasing was his only passion.

He reached the edge of the tornado’s path and stopped his truck. He got out and grabbed his camera. He aimed it at the swirling mass of wind and debris. He snapped several pictures, hoping to get a good shot. He felt the wind whipping his face and hair. He heard the roar of the tornado, like a freight train.

He looked at his camera screen and smiled. He had taken some amazing photos. He felt a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. He decided to get back in his truck and drive away before it was too late.

But it was too late.

The tornado had changed direction and was heading straight for him.

He realized his mistake too late.

He ran towards his truck, but he didn’t make it.

The tornado lifted him off the ground and threw him into the air.

He felt pain and fear.

He screamed.

Then he saw nothing.

###

Being a morning person is a good quality for a photographer who strives to capture the best light of the day. I’m not a morning person. However, I will drag myself out of bed for a predawn SpaceX launch in hopes of getting cool light effects.

Only this morning I woke up extra early, took the dogs out and found the launch had been pushed until shortly after sunrise. Oh, well! I was up already. So I headed to Cocoa Village’s Riverfront Park and took a few photos.

 
With the rocket heading away toward the northeast with its GPS cargo, the launch photos were ho-hum. (No doubt someone north of the launch site got a great pic with the rising sun.) But the sunrise photos were very nice indeed. And the video is relaxing – part sunrise timelapse, part launch.

Roll over any image to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

Another day, another rocket launch from the Space Coast – only it’s never routine. Especially when you have a SpaceX Heavy launch, a beautiful twilight and the return of two boosters to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Of course, someday I’d like to be super close to the booster return. I’ve seen a booster return from the Cape (and other places), but always with an obstructed view. That said, it’s pretty magical to see the separation from a little distance and witness all the mechanics of the return overhead and the boosters plummeting back to Earth. These moments really feel like science fiction.

 
So with all the wonder of this launch, with a Space Force payload, I’d say my photos are not technically great, but they’re interesting. The wide-angle shots are fine and caught the pretty light and arc of the contrail and “jellyfish.”

For the zoomed shots, I have a Nikon 200-500mm lens. I love it, for the most part, but it’s a challenge to focus on the fly because there isn’t just one infinity. (As my husband jokes, it’s to infinity and beyond.) So the trees far across the lagoon might be in focus, but the rocket as it lifts into the sky might be just a little “more” infinity. The lens is heavy, and while I sometimes use a tripod, handheld works better when you’re pointing up. Thus adjusting the focus to catch a zooming rocket poses an additional challenge. There’s also a haze factor at times, not to mention insane distances, but I think today my focus just wasn’t perfect.

Still, you can see the boosters separate and make their return burns in the photos, and yes, it’s still like science fiction. One of the coolest shots is a booster silhouetted, seemingly tiny, against the fiery orange of the contrail as the hardware hurtles back to Earth.

I ran two GoPros from my viewing spot in Cocoa Village, one in “Nightlapse” mode and the other in regular timelapse mode, trying to cover my bases as the light changed just after sunset. The videos were quite similar, only one was wider than the other. You can see both in the video.

Roll over any image to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.

I’m competitive. I try not to be. I know this society is all about WINNING ALL THE TIME. And I want to win and get approval and all of those things. But I don’t like my competitive tendencies all that much. They lead to comparison-itis, which plays a lot into my writing career. Not so much my photography, because I know I don’t always have the opportunities other photographers have. I try to make things work where I am.

I did have a great opportunity Monday evening, but time and logistics screwed me over. We had passes to be at the Cape Canaveral lighthouse for the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch and booster return. I spent hours getting my cameras ready and plotting where I would shoot.

We’d had a difficult time getting to the site (thanks to blocked roads) the last time we went to the lighthouse, so this time, I figured we’d take the “main” road we exited on last time. We traveled through the base and down this long road only to find it was blocked with no obvious, quick way around to our destination. Which we found out uncomfortably close to launch time. There was no way to figure out the right route there by then – Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is a sprawling campus webbed with pitch-black roads through wild areas that wind hither and yon – so we had to settle for a shot from the causeway.

 
This last-minute change meant I not only couldn’t get the shots I wanted, but I didn’t have time to set up all my cameras or properly set up what I had. The photos didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I was using a different camera for the long-lens shot than I usually do. It’s heavy with the 200-500mm lens and hard to handle anyway. I fumbled with the settings, messing up some shots and, in the process, somehow turning the quality setting from JPG Fine + RAW to just Fine as the rocket was in flight, limiting my editing options later. The streak shot on the other camera went out of frame, a less than desirable outcome. Basically, it was a photographic disaster.

Symbolic of this fiasco is the exposure after the streak shot; I accidentally hit the shutter again and got a crazy zigzag light show as I repositioned (the image you see in the blog list). Eh, maybe it’s art.

These photos aren’t awful. But they aren’t what I envisioned. And I saw another shot from the lighthouse that night – not the one I’d planned out, but still, it reminded me of the opportunity I missed. There was a painful lesson in this: Figure out the blocked roads ahead of time and allow an extra hour to get there and set up. Even if the launch is in the middle of the night. Or especially if it is.

Time is a photographer’s friend. You don’t always have that luxury; storm chasing is a prime example. It’s very much a run-and-gun situation. But when you can take extra time to set up, it’s always worthwhile.

You can roll over a photo to see the caption or click on one to start a slide show.