Luna & Lightning...

(Photo:  Lisa Erin Brown)

Per usual, I took some pictures of the first Full Moon for August, 2012 (there are two this month), just like every other Full Moon during the year. However, I'm going to make a confession. The photos in this post were taken the night before on July 31st. The moon does look pretty full, but it was roughly 24 hours before the Full Moon's peak.

The skies over Savannah had been overcast for at least a week (we even got a couple of afternoon thunderstorms which were very welcome), so there were some interesting things happening with the clouds on Tuesday night. I love the textures and colors I can get during those times, so I took advantage.

(Photo:  Lisa Erin Brown)

When the time of the Full Moon's peak did arrive, I was feeling happy that I had taken the pictures the night before. The official Full Moon in Aquarius, was indeed full...and big. There just wasn't much going on that made the photo op interesting. No clouds of any kind. No trees that had their limbs placed just-so for some creative framing. It was...just there. Like a big shutter-less, gel-less, single Fresnel lamp. Starkly shining down. Bright, but aside from that pretty average. Bummer.
As I stood there trying to decide if I wanted to walk around a little bit more to see if something interesting presented itself...something interesting did. Across the line of parking spaces and driveway in front of the condo building, there is a relatively open area with trees and other buildings to either side. It was while I was making my final scan that I noticed an orange tinged light flashing on the other side of some tall trees. I folded up the tripod and headed over that way to see what it was.  What it was, was amazing.

As I got closer to the area beyond the trees, I noticed a big dark billowy mass of clouds slowly creeping across the sky. It was not headed my way, but it was still relatively close. It hung there ominously, like a cloud mass in a horror film. Now for the beautifully eerie part. Inside the huge mass of clouds were bright orange neon explosions of lightning. The brilliant flashes were sporadic, and varied greatly in size.  Some were in the form of big surges of light, while others were veined with electric shafts of lightning. It was really amazing to see.
The digital camera I currently take pictures with has a video option. I taped the light show for a couple of minutes. The quality of the recording doesn't give the whole picture of what I saw. The outline of the cloud mass isn't discernible, so you can't really experience how "alive" the clouds were from that perspective. The flashes were constant, but through some sections of the video the flashes percolating throughout the cloud were rather low. Hopefully, my description and the flashes I was able to capture will give you enough of an idea of what it was like. The video above is roughly two minutes long.

(Photo:  Lisa Erin Brown)

(Photo:  Lisa Erin Brown)