Purple Haze
Image by A Guy Named Nyal
A shot from the storm that blew through on 11 July 2023.
The monsoon season officially started on June 15 and lasts through September but up until last Tuesday we’ve had nothing but the hot!
The rest of the week was forecast to be dry with little chance of any rain (and it certainly was) but that’s just a forecast and Mother Nature doesn’t pay any attention to forecasts. Everything I’ve seen and heard is saying tonight might be a good night, we’ll have to wait and see.
I’ve found myself a new place to shoot from that should give me a better view of the storms as they roll through Tucson. No guarantees since lightning hits where and when it wants but with any luck I’ll get a few more good ones!
The thing I found interesting about this is how it’s much brighter from the middle down to the ground. From what I’ve read a powerful negative charge (called a step leader) shoots down and makes contact with a positively charged object on the ground (called a positive streamer) reaching up.
When the two connect, a strong discharge occurs with a loud cracking sound. This causes a powerful and violent current, resulting in a return stroke, racing back to the cloud at 60 000 miles per second. The return stroke is the bright flash we observe as a lightning strike. Maybe it’s the junction where the the leader and the streamer met?
For those who are interested this shot is SOOC other than a conversion from RAW to JPG. I had 26 seconds with the shutter open to catch this bolt.
