A Bolt from the Blue

When the sun rises or sets its elevation angle changes. The result is that the lighting goes through a series of twilights and “magic hours”, defined by the elevation angle.

This photograph was taken during the “blue hour”, which happens over a time frame of minutes, and not a full hour.

Northern New Mexico is a great place to observe the changing color of the sky through the sunset and twilights.  This is due to the very clear air we have here.  Most people mistakenly think the sunsets here are so colorful due to dust or smoke.  The pure air has more Rayleigh scattering, which scatters the shorter wavelengths (blues and purples) more than the warmer colors.  When the sunlight traverses a very long path length, like at sunset, there is so much scattering of the cooler colors, that the light we see has a higher proportion of warm colors (reds and oranges).

The “blue hour” occurs near the end of civil twilight, when the sun is between [-4 deg,-6 deg] below the horizon.  During this time there is a smooth and gradual transition into the darkness of night.  It is one of my favorite times to photograph as it sets a beautiful tone to images and you can see the planets and still the outline of the mountains.

Lightning bolts can strike more than once in the same place, counter the saying “lightning never strikes twice in the same place”.  The reality is that on the main channel lighting flows down, it oscillates up and down many times.  You can almost see this with your naked eye, or when you zoom way into a photo of lightning you can see the adjacent paths of the many different arcs.

In this photograph, the thick lightning bolt is actually a capture of many sequential bolts of lightning that travel down the same path through the air.  They travel down the same path since the first bolt ionizes the air and therefore creates an “electrical channel” with less resistance than the un-electrified air.  A smaller lightning bolt that is starting to “reach out” (a “leader”) can be seen on the upper left side of the cloud

The path of the large lightning bolt is amazing as if it has a mind of its own.  It reaches out horizontally for a long way then sharply turns down towards the ground at a 90-degree angle.   This an example of a “bolt of out the blue sky”, where a lightning strike occurs far from the cloud where it started.  The best example I saw of this was lightning bolt start in a cloud over the Sangre de Cristo mountains by Santa Fe and traverse the entire Rio Grande Valley and touch down in the Jemez Mountains by Los Alamos.