Clouds, With a Planetary Chaser

I stepped onto my driveway at around 7:30 p.m. Eastern, to see if I could photograph Jupiter and Venus. For the next ten minutes -- a time period that seemed much longer -- I witnessed a race between the storm clouds that were building and the planets' appearance as twilight advanced. I took the shot above as I waited for the light level to drop.

Last night, clouds had at first covered the western sky and left the east clear. Today the opposite occurred. The skies at east-northeast trended from solid gray to solid black. The western sky was clear when I stepped outdoors, but was still too bright for me to see the planets. The clouds above had lain in the east-southeast, and they became increasingly foreboding:



Thunder growled steadily by this time. I found myself bracing for rain.





I turned, to where more clouds gathered in the northwest:



A dragonfly found its way into this next shot, near upper right:



More visible in the large view.

This was the scene coming in from the north:



By this time Venus and Jupiter had begun to peek out, but one or the other (or both) kept getting covered by wisps of cloud. Finally, at around 7:40, I caught both of them out in the open -- just before the cloud bank covered them:



Venus, the brighter object at right, has now risen higher than Jupiter. (If Venus were at the center of a clock face, Jupiter would be at the 8 o'clock position.) The day before, they'd been pretty much across from each other. Two days ago, Jupiter had been higher.

North-northwest had become solid overcast. Pretty soon, the entire sky was covered in this:



Lightning and a loud thunderclap hit in the northwest about two minutes after I took the shot. It was a gorgeous bolt, and for a moment I debated staying outside to see if I could catch one on pixel. I headed indoors instead. Minutes later another bolt gave us a temporary blackout, followed by rain.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks. Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.