Prior to last night’s little episode with lightning & thunder (which almost blew me into next month), the approaching storm gave a fantastic display of mammatus clouds just before it got dark.
Usually seen at the bottom of a cumulonimbus cloud, they’re a sign of a huge amount of turbulence above as opposing updrafts and downdrafts in the clouds churn the air.
The name comes from their sack-like appearance, looking like breasts hanging down from the clouds. As a pilot, I would avoid flying underneath.
We don’t see these out in this part of the world often, so this was a treat. This particular storm cell was just starting to drop some light rain, and it had moved on and wasn’t responsible for the lighting and thunder later, but with this sort of activity building you can bet that it lit up the skies up over Ventura and Santa Barbara counties later.
What stood out in a wider view is the distinct difference in the cloud’s appearance across the bottom. On the right you see it smooth and fairly featureless where rain was starting to fall and obscure the mammatus formations above it.
But on the left you can still see up through a hole in the rain layer to the higher formation in the cloud. I was surprised to see that foundry so clearly defined.
Mammatus clouds – a good sign that meteorological mischief is afoot. And maybe a good time to get inside, or at least under the porch awning, and off of the golf course or lawn.
Sort of out of nowhere today the weather kicked up over the Catalina Channel to our south and a series of fairly good sized thunderstorm cells started drifting north over the Los Angeles basin. We don’t get that sort of weather often, maybe once every couple of years at best, and often even when we do, the storms tend to drift inland into Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and miss us over here at the far west end of Los Angeles County.
Not today.
It’s no secret that I absolutely ❤ LOVE ❤ rain and thunderstorms. So when they started coming in, I grabbed a whole slew of cameras and gear over the evening to take pictures of the clouds (some fantastic pictures of mammatus clouds right over head), to listen to the rain, wind, and thunder, and to try to catch lightning strikes on video.
Eventually about 20:30 there was a good sized cell sitting just to our south.
(Image from NOAA High-Def Weather Radar app)
Sitting out in the back yard, listening to the rain pounding on the back porch roof and the howling of the wind, seeing the flashes of lightning, this (long-ish, 4:31 total) clip ends (at 3:36) with a HUGE boomer. That was a good one!
A little later things had fired up again and a couple of big thunder boomers had rattled the house, so I took my iPhone out into the front. Another cell was coming in south of Calabasas, so I started recording. It was raining pretty hard, so I stayed on the porch, but then I couldn’t see the sky real well, so I decided to walk down to the garage door, figuring I could lean against the garage and stay pretty much out of the rain, but still have a good view of the sky. Just as I got there, at about 0:55 in this clip, and turned around… (I urge caution if you’re listening with headphones or earbuds or have the volume turned up!!)
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!
How I managed to not clear out the deepest darkest corner of my obscenity directory, I’ll never know. How I managed to not come in with brown jeans when I went out with blue jeans, I’ll never know.
Curious, once I got my heart rate back down into double digits, while editing the video I checked a few figures on the timeline.
The frame where the bolt struck, at 1:02977 seconds.
The frame where the sound hit, at 1.04070 seconds.
That’s an elapsed time of 1.093 seconds. With the speed of sound being 1100 feet per second, that means that the bolt hit somewhere down the street 1,202 feet away.
That’s a really high “pucker factor.”
Furthermore, look at the soundtrack magnified way, way up:
About 1/20 second before the sound hit, there’s this.
An extremely vivid part of my memory of the event is that the incredibly bright flash hit, but in that 1.093 seconds between the strike and the sound I very distinctly heard a frying or sizzling noise, almost like someone on the roof right above me had a big sheet of cellophane and was crumbling it up into a ball. I think this is that sound. Why I would hear it separate from the “BOOOOOOM!” and every so slightly earlier, I don’t know.
Looking at the map shows more waves of showers building to the south and headed our way…
As pretty much everyone in North America west of the Mississippi knows, it’s been hot as Hell all week.
In this neck of the woods there’s also been some moisture coming up from a tropical storm off of Baja, so it hasn’t been a dry heat.
As the moist air hits the coast it rises a bit and starts to form clouds – as it hits the mountains, it rises a lot and starts to form thunderheads.
As much as we could use the rain (we’re in a massive drought, bordering on outright emergency conditions), all we usually get is lightning – which, added to the heat and drought, is threatening to make this a brush fire season that’s worse than last year, and last year was the worst EVER on record.
Big clouds. Broken. Puffy. Probably VFR conditions breaking through that deck, but I don’t know if I would push my luck and go through on a check ride.
More clouds to the north but a different pattern. Can you see the tiny hummingbird?
Now can you find the tiny hummingbird? How about the mid-sized jet? A Southwest 747 to be exact, going straight in to Burbank Runway 8. Small compared to the clouds, huge compared to the hummingbird, mid-sized compared to a 747.
The odds were in their favor, as we saw all day yesterday. I did not have my hopes up and I wasn’t disappointed.
I got up at 02:30, about the time the partial phases were supposed to be starting.
The partial phase of the eclipse starts in five minutes – from LA, it’s about 95%+ cloudy. That moon is still bright through the breaks in the clouds, but details will be spotty, at best. pic.twitter.com/NDWcd8f5es
I sort of remember wandering around to look out the window about 04:00-ish – there as a dim reddish spot in the clouds over in the west, but nothing that prevented a quick retreat to a warm bed.
A few hours later, of course:
That’s a stunning shade of blue – where was it ten hours earlier?
Even toward the west, where the coast and the haze and the “coastal eddy,” “May gray,” “June gloom” always lurk, it was unlimited visibility.
The next total lunar eclipse for the US West Coast is November 8, 2022, seventeen and a half months away. I’m sure the weather forecast is for clouds. (Yes, there’s an earlier total lunar eclipse on May 16, 2022, just under a year away, but it’s occurring just as the moon is rising in Los Angeles, so we might not see much of it at all.)
Now, at 23:05 local, with totality beginning at 04:11 local, a little over five hours from now, it’s… complicated.
On the one hand, it looks spectacular.
On the other hand, it’s about 80% cloud covered – and getting worse.
I’ve got the cameras all ready to go and the alarms set – we’ll see if I can drag my sorry butt out of bed in the middle of the night to at least check to see how cloudy it is.
Tomorrow night there’s a total eclipse of the moon, visible from all over the Pacific hemisphere. If you’re in Europe or eastern North or South America, better luck next time. If you’re in Hawaii, you’re golden. In eastern Australia or New Zealand, you’ll see it in the east not too long after moonrise. If you’re in Los Angeles or on the US West Coast, you’ll see it just before sunrise.
Unlike solar eclipses (*NEVER* look at a solar eclipse with the naked eye or any kind of magnification), lunar eclipses are 100% safe to look at with the naked eye, or with binoculars, or a telescope. In this case, if you’re in LA or San Diego or San Francisco or Phoenix or Seattle (you get the idea) your biggest issues will be possible clouds and getting up at 03:00. (I plan on being ready, getting up, checking for clouds, and if they’re there, I’m back in bed!)
Here’s a great site for information on when the different phases of the eclipse start, including detailed information for major cities. This is a short eclipse by lunar eclipse standards. The full phase of the eclipse is only fourteen minutes long, 04:11 to 04:25 in Los Angeles.
After being “clear and a bazillion” for the whole day, I rolled the telescope out late this afternoon and within second it was starting to cloud up.
By the time the moon rose and cleared those trees, it was downright “yucky.” (That’s an official, technical, internationally recognized astronomy term by the way.) I was testing out my equipment for attaching my good DSLR cameras directly to the telescope, using it as a humongous telephoto lens.
The moon was there – the focus wasn’t.
I’m going to blame the clouds. Which is not unreasonable at all, they were an issue.
In addition, right around full moon (we’re 27 hours away, since lunar eclipse = full moon, by definition = do the geometry) most of the moon’s surface looks flat and featureless.
The “good” pictures are always along the terminator, the division between night and day on the lunar surface, where the shadows are sharp.
You can see a tiny bit of that along the top side, where some of the craters on the limb (edge of the visible disk) are highlighted. But not much.
For example, this picture showing the center of the moon with no portion of the limb? Lots of rays and some bright spots, but no shadows with the Sun almost straight overhead.
We’ll see what tomorrow night / Wednesday pre-dawn brings for the eclipse. Keep your fingers crossed!
In the latest round in the unending battle between the clouds and the wonders of the Universe which they can and will obscure every chance they get, tonight we got this at sunset:
Somewhere out there also was the “Pink Super Moon” rising. It’s not just a theory, I know it was there and rising because I have a great deal of faith in celestial mechanics.
But in every direction all you could see were clouds.
There were spots where a bit of fading blue showed through, but there were more places where the cloud deck was thick and threatening.
I saw reports from friends around the LA area that in places it was even starting to rain. (Which, as I said last night, we sorta desperately need, but…)
So no “super moon,” pink or otherwise for us. Just maybe some drizzle so I can shut off the sprinklers for one more night.
If you’ve seen my pictures of comets and conjunctions and ISS passes and so on you’ll remember that there’s a really bright, annoying, pain in the ass street light right at the south corner of our front yard.
Suddenly, about a week ago, it went out.
That’s it in the lower left, silhouetted in the dim moonlight and light pollution. No idea why, no clue when they’ll be by to fix it.
So, NOW!! Quick!! Before they fix it! Get out the telescope and cameras! (Although the view of Woodland Hills is nice…)
Except that, OF COURSE, every night since it went out has been cloudy and dark and it’s a big deal to kinda, sorta, maybe see the moon poking through the holes.
Who says that the gods don’t have a sense of humor?
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 