The Photos

By popular request, some photos of last night's amazing sky show.

The sky was yellow at first, and bright enough to illuminate everything with an eerie yellow hue. It was truly like looking through yellow tinted lenses. Or being on another planet with a different atmosphere. (Yes I read a lot of sci-fi. What of it?) The clouds were roiling around after the rain stopped without any lasting or discernible shape at first. Soon, they began to form rounded shapes here and there.



The yellow mellowed out into a rosy golden glow just as the spheroids became more pronounced.



As the sky darkened and the colors deepened, the spherical shapes stretched out into streamers and began to break up.



The colored, diffuse illumination was so strangely beautiful that I wished it would last. But sunsets happen quickly and all too soon the show was over. Good thing I had a camera handy! I tried to take some long exposures to capture the lightning bugs. That venture was not successful. I caught a few, but the photos were not very dramatic, and seemed to be missing the spirit of how they look in person.

Golden skies and lightning bugs

Thunderstorms passed through just before sunset, resulting in an unusual color cast to the sky. It began as a golden yellow hue from the low clouds that made all of the wet trees and grass look greener. Then the thinning cloud cover took on a rosy orange hue before fading to twilight blue. The clouds were constantly in motion and bubbling into strange spherical masses as they broke up. The illumination from the sky made it feel like I was looking at the yard through colored filters. Everything took on the color of the clouds.

Once it was mostly dark, the lightning bugs started their show. They really outdid themselves tonight. Not sure why, but there seem to be many more of them this year than usual. Maybe I am just noticing more of them because I'm spending so much more time outside on the porch. Whatever the reason, I am grateful. I could spend hours watching them dance and glow.