Eye

Glenda

We had a doozy of a thunderstorm last night. While I was out photographing the lightning, the lightning took out my gigabit switch. I turned my NAS drives back on after the power came back on and stayed on afterand they couldn’t connect to the network. I finally figured out the switch wasn’t working. I dug out an older switch that solved the connection problem, but at 100MB/s it’s the connection is really slow. I ordered a new switch and a UPS backup to plug the switch and NAS drives into.

The lightning bolt in the fifth photo was so close that the flash and the boom were simultaneous, and then a torrent of rain came pouring down. I got under the cover of the deck, but the rain was blowing into the deck through the wire, so I finally went inside.

Glenda giving me dragon eyes.

You Beavers Lighting Up Our Lives

Got lighting? There was six beaver in the river at Beaver Point tonight.

Jupiter’s moons were in a formation I had not seen before. When I looked at the image on my camera’s screen at 5:00 am I thought I was moving the camera and getting a double image of the moons, but since Jupiter is round, the moons were really sitting side by side.

The moon through a thin layer of clouds.

Stormy Sunday

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We had thunderstorms coming in from all directions this afternoon. The thunderstorm that built up over the Sandias was the most dramatic. While out on a walk before the storms, I encountered a little bit of wildlife.

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Buckeye Butterfly

This video of the Great Purple Hairstreak Butterfly shows how it moves the flanges on the ends of its wings while it feeds. I assume it’s to fool predators into going after the flanges on its wings, giving it a chance to escape.

Blue Hairstreak

Silver kitty

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Thunderstorm activity to the north.

Lightning Show

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I was talking to an engineer, who is also an avid photographer, about taking lightning photos when I went up to pick up a piece of equipment he had been working on. We were noting that lightning is easy to photograph, but the danger made up for how easy it is to photograph. On may way home at 11:00 pm, there was a nice lightning show over the city, so I pulled off to the side of the road in the rain, set my camera on top of the car to stabilize it (didn’t have a tripod in the car), and took a few lighting photos before I got soaked in the rain. The results are interesting.

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