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What a marvelous night of magical sights! The evening of July 14 started with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, where our little band watched the twilight show. Dawn and twilight launches are the best chance to see the “jellyfish” as the sun lights up the dramatic cloud features created by the rocket’s journey.

After the launch, Alethea Kontis and I went to the shore of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge, Florida, to shoot photos of a line of lightning storms offshore – and the magnificent moon rising above them. Not captured here is the bioluminescence in the river, as every little movement by fish and other creatures left trails of glowing blue behind like underwater fireworks.

The pictures and videos tell the story best. I’ve stayed up too late putting these together, so I’ll let them speak for themselves. Roll over a photo to see a caption, or click on any image to start a slide show.

 
It was a warm morning. No, hot. Just the prelude to a very hot afternoon. And a flock of zebra longwing butterflies was hanging out amid the branches of the scraggly lime tree on the side of our house.

I see these butterflies often in our yard. They’re the Florida state butterfly, in fact. I’m sure our neighborhood would have more of these visitors if people would refrain from bringing in the professional insect killers to spray clouds of poison every few weeks. Sigh. I try to give these lovely butterflies a safe place to hang out.

This relaxing video shows these beautiful creatures fluttering in slow motion.

The show is almost over. The last few night-blooming cereus blossoms are maturing on our cactus vines, which climb a palm tree and our front porch. I’m also trying to start one in our live oak after seeing photos of a dazzling display in Orlando.

What am I talking about? The dinner-plate-size flowers that each bloom for just one night. Here in central Florida, they start blooming in May.

This year, as I do every year, I shot timelapse video of the flowers opening. Only this time, I included it in a three-minute documentary about the blooms. It pretty much says it all. These delicate dancers of the night live their best life when most creatures are asleep.

See the video above, or click on any of these images to start a slide show.

I believe I am not the only one: Photographers spend a lot of time thinking about what they could’ve done better. Storm chasing is much the same way. If I had access to a time machine, there are several tornado events I’d like to revisit, reshoot and re-experience. Of course, it helps when you know where things will happen and when.

Last night, or should I say early this morning, I had one of those moments when shooting a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of a Globalstar satellite.

Rocket launches are challenging. Pads change. Rockets change. Trajectories change. And even if you’re using an app or dead reckoning or whatever, it’s sometimes hard to predict exactly where the rocket will appear in your photo. I’m so impressed by the photographers who do the math and get a rocket crossing the moon. I’m just trying to figure out where it’s going to leave the horizon and how the arc of a time exposure at night will frame objects in the foreground.

I set up at Port Canaveral by Exploration Tower. My GoPro timelapse would include the tower; I planned for my still image, shot with a Nikon D500, not to include it. But I knew the industrial towers across the water might be a problem; the rocket would go up around there, and one of the towers might block the horizon where it lifted off. And that’s exactly what happened. I should’ve stayed in position to get the reflection I wanted, but at the last moment I dashed away a few feet to shoot the still image and basically didn’t get anything I wanted. Sigh. That said, here’s the image so you can judge for yourself.

Complicating matters, a lightning storm in the distance taunted me, but without two different exposures and compositing the images, I didn’t see a great way to get the launch and the lightning in my photo. I did get a couple of stills with just the storm, soft and dim over the port’s bright lights.

The video, on the other hand, is pretty darn cool. The lightning storm offshore to the north strobes as the port’s lights flicker and change color. Suddenly, with a brilliant burst of light, the rocket launches upward, sets the clouds aglow, then arcs as it continues toward orbit. The whole video is less than a minute. I love all the color and light.

And I’m already considering how to frame the next one.

Is it storm chasing when there are not actually storms to chase? I say yes. Especially when we wander around traditional chase territory in between the storms.

On May 22, we built our day around a visit to the U Drop Inn – the 1936 Conoco gas station that’s been beautifully restored in Shamrock, Texas. It’s a Route 66 landmark and inspired the garage in the movie “Cars.” In fact, we arrived the night before and got a few photos then. But when we planned to visit, it was Sunday, and Texas is closed on Sunday, apparently. I’ve been before but really wanted to visit the cafe, which is actually operating now.

Still, we saw a few other outdoor attractions in Shamrock (see the photos) before moving on. I had no idea an alleged piece of the Blarney Stone was here.

Moving on, we had a nice lunch in Wheeler, then went on to find the remote and desolate intersection in the Texas Panhandle where the last scene of “Cast Away” was filmed. This is where Tom Hanks’s character delivers the package he kept unopened while stranded on the desert island – a symbol of dedication and hope that leads him to promise for his future.

 

We did our best to channel Tom Hanks, and Alethea created a mini “Wilson” out of a rock, since no volleyballs were at hand. She left it there. If you find it, let us know! (Where is the “Cast Away” intersection? Near Mobeetie, Texas. Program 35°38’2.18″ N 100°27’4.99″ W into your map app.)

We also headed to Groom, Texas, perhaps best known for its giant cross. We focused on the leaning tower of Texas, aka the Britten water tower, which leans and balances on two legs thanks to the perfect amount of water in its tank. It was positioned this way to attract visitors to a truck stop that burned down long ago. You can read more on the excellent Atlas Obscura website.

Then it was on to The Big Texan in Amarillo, where we did not eat a “free” 72-ounce steak* … *dinner if eaten in one hour. That asterisk is on all the billboards. Look for it!

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

I can look at prairie dogs forever. (You can probably tell from the video, which is five minutes of pure cute.) I find it so relaxing to watch them, plus they’re adorable. I had a great experience taking photos there last year, so when Alethea Kontis and I had a break in our slow storm-chasing season, we made a trip to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma to visit their town again.

Prairie dogs eat plants and bugs and live in burrows. According to Wikipedia, members of the same family group “kiss” and groom one another. The babies spend their first six weeks underground and are fully grown in five months. We were lucky enough to catch young ones playing in the meadow.

They made a few sounds while I was there, but it was a very windy day, creating a lot of wind noise in the microphone, and in the face of a loud mansplaining tourist, several yelling kids, and droning motorcycles, I decided to minimize natural sound in the video and use music instead.

 
Of course, there’s more than prairie dogs at the refuge. There’s great scenery, bison and other animals. It’s well worth a visit.

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

We saw beautiful atmospheric phenomena on May 20, but it was a minimalist storm chase. Still, it was atmospheric as only Texas can be.

First, it was seriously hot – 97F, not the kind of temperature you expect to be conducive to severe storms. We played around a cold front (not that cold) and dryline and followed clouds around with the kind of hope that only desperate storm chasers have. Storm chasers who, one might add, were here from somewhere else and so didn’t have quotidian distractions to prevent us from chasing.

This is the kind of chase day that’s a real reality check for the hardcore storm chaser. Not every day can produce tornadoes and photogenic supercells. Especially in 2022.

 
Alethea Kontis and I waited in Olney, Texas, for a while for a scant chance of storms, even sampling a frozen coffee drink at Hometown Coffee & Tea (it was excellent). Then we drove around in a triangular “circle” or two, passed a really cool “graveyard” of roadside signs and old cars and trucks, and ended up “chasing” a couple of storms until they died about an hour later. One was “severe” (today, pretty much everything had quotes around it). Let’s just say we were underwhelmed.

The sunset was beautiful, though, with a wavering orange sun sliding down behind wind turbines and power lines at Throckmorton as the sky lit up in orange and blue. We started the chase at an Allsup’s and ended up at one, with the feral cats sitting in judgment as we ate our burritos. Now that’s Texas storm chasing.

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

We had one of the best storm chases of our trip on May 18, 2022, as we pursued a beautiful supercell through the Texas Panhandle from our starting point in Boise City, Oklahoma. We chose this starting point because we wanted to revisit Cimmy, the steel sculpture of an apatosaurus scaled to replicate a dinosaur dug up in Cimarron County.

As a bonus, there’s a 750-pound Tin Man out front. I appreciate any and all Oz references on the road.

For the first time, Alethea Kontis and I actually went inside the museum. One enters through what was once a unique house. The Cox House, now the Cimarron Heritage Center, was designed by Kansas architect Bruce Goff in 1949; behind it, the museum continues in a large add-on interior space and a massive backyard featuring historic structures. We didn’t have time to see it all, but since I dig mid-century architecture, I loved seeing the house.

The house’s clean mid-century sensibility is somewhat obscured by the clutter of museum artifacts now, but it’s fascinating. According to the museum’s interesting website, there are no conventional interior doors, just plastic accordion doors, and all the walls are concrete and brick, paneled in walnut.

A couple of items that caught my eye during our quick walk-through were Opal Cox’s amazing button collection and a peculiar horsehide coat; the original owner had it made from the hide of a favorite horse after it died.

Finally, we saw a storm forming in eastern New Mexico and headed southwest into the northwest Texas Panhandle to intercept it. This remote area had plenty of prairie dogs and lonely roads, which we enjoyed on a leisurely chase, keeping level with the evolving supercell as it moved south.

Near Vega, Texas, close to sunset, the storm was especially beautiful. Smoke from what was likely a lightning fire drifted under it as the setting sun lit the base and wind turbines churned in its path. The video alternates between music (during timelapse sequences) and natural sound because I wanted to convey the rich backdrop of wind, grinding turbines, birdsong and thunder.

Later, the storm showed some rotation, as you can see in the video, but it never got serious about going tornadic.

South of I-40, we followed the storm all the way to Hereford, though by this time, just as the structure was really getting nice, it outran us. We captured a little lightning and finally had to give up this very satisfying chase as the storm blasted us with dust in town.

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

After Alethea and I took a little writing break during our slow storm season, we left South Dakota and headed south through Nebraska to intercept storms in northern Kansas. Of course, we saw a sun halo along the way. It’s been that kind of year.

And yes, it was a haul, and we were north of the storms when a landspout tornado occurred. We didn’t see it, but we got south of the line anyway and watched the storms develop. There wasn’t much in the way of rotation, but it was ELECTRICAL!

I took a lot of photos and video as the line of storms produced one lightning bolt after another. You can see almost continuous zappage in the “Kansas Zap Fest” video. And there’s a mix of Nikon stills and video grabs in the gallery. I do love the infinite variety and quirky behavior of each lightning bolt. #ZapBang!

Alethea Kontis and I took a few days in the middle of our storm-chasing trip for a mini writing retreat during the lull in storms. We found a neat little Airbnb in Lead, South Dakota. And since the night was clear on May 15, we figured we should check out the total lunar eclipse of the “flower moon.”

We found a spot high on a hill above a cemetery where we could see the full moon rise over the next ridge, above the trees and among the stars. We watched totality obscure the moon in a ruddy orange.

I did a simple wide-angle timelapse with one of my Nikon cameras. I wished I’d gotten out my Big Bertha lens and done a telephoto shot. Don’t photographers always think of what they should’ve done? Frankly, we had kind of a casual approach to the eclipse. We really just wanted to enjoy the event as it happened, and it was beautiful indeed.