For want of a camera
The photo was lost. It was amazing.
We had an afternoon of "alarums and excursions" with the weather. Tornado warnings to the left of us, severe thunderstorms to the right of us, and you could see it on the radar, like the parallel rails of a railroad track running NNE up into Wisconsin. Again, we only got some bursts of heavy rain alternating with bright sunlight that lit the clouds up to the east and made the ones to the west look amazingly dark and ominous. A tornado warning was actually issued for Harvard around 2:45 pm, but by the time we learned of it the danger had already passed. The tornado was identified on radar and tracked up into Wisconsin before a ground spotter actually reported it. As far as I know at this point, it never actually touched down.
There were heavy winds just the same, and trees and tree branches down in some areas. Electricity went out at my home for about four hours, though it just flickered repeatedly at the library.
But the photo op missed... Because we had no electric power, we drove into Woodstock to have dinner at a restaurant. When we came out of the restaurant, there was a beautiful cloud formation, something that I gather is called a cumulus castellanus but which my father would have termed a "squall line". It ran from horizon to horizon, NE to SSW, and consisted of a continuous line of puffy white cumulus clouds. Perfectly flat on the bottom, it was high enough that you could see under it to the blue sky on the other side. The tops were boiling slowly, trying to pop up into real thunderstorms but not quite making it. These alternate peaks and valleys looked like the crenellated wall of a castle to someone, hence the Latin name for the cloud formation. There may well have been some heavy rain falling from the dark bottom of that line of clouds, but the sun on the tops was beautiful and especially so against the clear blue sky that followed the earlier storm activity.
Driving home we had several wide open views of the whole thing, and it was quite distractingly beautiful. Once we got home I looked for a vantage point from which to photograph it, but we have no clear views in that direction due to tall trees. I resisted the urge to get back in a car and drive east to where I could shoot over an open field (about three miles or so.)
We had an afternoon of "alarums and excursions" with the weather. Tornado warnings to the left of us, severe thunderstorms to the right of us, and you could see it on the radar, like the parallel rails of a railroad track running NNE up into Wisconsin. Again, we only got some bursts of heavy rain alternating with bright sunlight that lit the clouds up to the east and made the ones to the west look amazingly dark and ominous. A tornado warning was actually issued for Harvard around 2:45 pm, but by the time we learned of it the danger had already passed. The tornado was identified on radar and tracked up into Wisconsin before a ground spotter actually reported it. As far as I know at this point, it never actually touched down.
There were heavy winds just the same, and trees and tree branches down in some areas. Electricity went out at my home for about four hours, though it just flickered repeatedly at the library.
But the photo op missed... Because we had no electric power, we drove into Woodstock to have dinner at a restaurant. When we came out of the restaurant, there was a beautiful cloud formation, something that I gather is called a cumulus castellanus but which my father would have termed a "squall line". It ran from horizon to horizon, NE to SSW, and consisted of a continuous line of puffy white cumulus clouds. Perfectly flat on the bottom, it was high enough that you could see under it to the blue sky on the other side. The tops were boiling slowly, trying to pop up into real thunderstorms but not quite making it. These alternate peaks and valleys looked like the crenellated wall of a castle to someone, hence the Latin name for the cloud formation. There may well have been some heavy rain falling from the dark bottom of that line of clouds, but the sun on the tops was beautiful and especially so against the clear blue sky that followed the earlier storm activity.
Driving home we had several wide open views of the whole thing, and it was quite distractingly beautiful. Once we got home I looked for a vantage point from which to photograph it, but we have no clear views in that direction due to tall trees. I resisted the urge to get back in a car and drive east to where I could shoot over an open field (about three miles or so.)