Black Throated Sparrow keeping an eye on Black Canyon Trail a couple weeks ago. I like the racing stripes on these critters.

Another view from Black Canyon Trail, looking at a crest in the trail just ahead with Brittlebrush & Saguaro soaking in the sun as clouds parted. #sonorandesert

Costas Hummingbird along Lost Dog Wash Trail. Approaching a bend at the bottom of the wash I could hear some scratchy pips sounding away, a bit off the trail. Some long red flowers came into view & figured that must be the buffet. It eventually came back around making its rounds. #hummingbirds

So Black Canyon Trail—Wow. I mean every hilly part of the Sonoran Desert I guess, but this saguaro grove in particular. Lovely. There's a big bird nest up in that old-timer saguaro on the left. Not sure what's abiding in there but saw something zoom into it as I rounded the bend. #saguaro

A Brown or Canyon Towhee along the Black Canyon Trail. I was trying to get some California Poppy scenes, but rain had those all folded up for the day. Once the sun came out, the birds started to emerge & call out alarms about unstealthy rock-kicker guy. #birding

A bit of hiking happened in the McDowell Mountains, when this Side Blotched Lizard showed up trailside and let me aim a big glass eyeball at it for a few minutes.

Gigantic Sunspot AR4366 just now. It's been tossing out X-class flares, but no CMEs. It has those locked up tight, so no aurora potential from that while it's crossing the meridian. Holding a solar filter up, it's just barely visible to the eye without magnification. #solarimaging #sunspots

Color enhanced pic of the moon last night—a day after full. Rusts & toilet-cleaner blue in the maria with light cyan showing up in the bright, newer impacts. Setting those bright areas to neutral turns the rest of the surface dusty rose & harder to see the other color breaks. #astrophotography #moon

Tonight's Snow Moonrise — these funny names. Anyway, check out those ripples as it ascends through all the little refractive layers. I need more moon & cinder cones now. #snowmoon

An electrically productive little storm that sealed up my 2024 chase season, near Eads, Colorado — June 8th. 20 image stack. #weatherphotography #stormchasing #lightning

The Moon was a couple days before full this afternoon. It gives you that full Moon appearance while still showing some relief with the terminator sitting on the limb like that. Tycho's ray system is so cool.

The Ninemile Creek drainage east of Lawton, Oklahoma, was a great place to watch a rocketing updraft dry up and shear out as a new anvil approached from the north — June 4, 2024. #weatherphotography #stormchasing

A tale of April 25th: another fun Texas Panhandle day, where I learned what poor application of the storm nudger hypothesis looks like. Still nabbed the Sudan tornado, but just barely due to positioning on a downstream cell that wouldn't benefit from nudging. #stormchasing #weatherphotography

A photographic tale of the April 24th Matador, Texas, tornado & storm chase is all pulled together now. The view of it from the west was short, only about three minutes, but had some great light while it lasted. #stormchasing #weatherphotography

One of the best ways to bring old, left-behind images to life is to finally draft chase journals from months ago. Now in the thick of building out the 2025 chases — and the photo-illustrated April 22 Fort Stockton inflow monster adventure is ready. #stormchasing #weatherphotography

The long road to storms in the Mississippi Delta led to a detour for stretching of legs and clicking of shutters on the north Arkansas border at Mammoth Spring State Park. The spring has impressive water flow and the surrounding path gives some great views.

This one was puckering up for a great big kiss as it approached Briggs, Texas, May 1st. The 1st Oakalla tornado had finished roping out about 6 minutes earlier behind this new RFD punch. Just imagining someone walking out of that shop & the sudden double-take to see that looming. #weatherphotography

Storms were mostly goobery this day, except for a weird hybrid tornado near Belvue, Kansas, still hiding unannounced on my rear dashcam footage. Sunset was kind though and turned up a bunch of color and texture before everything muddied back up. April 28th, near Delia. #weatherphotography

Social media disfavors landscape crop. And I can't seem to adapt. Oh well. April 25th, after a couple tornadoes, this thing was still rolling along west of Lubbock, TX and happened to backdrop an old rusted wheel—that probably disappears at shriveled landscape sizes on phones. #weatherphotography

I can't recall experiencing a more perfect wall cloud than the one that dropped out of the April 24 Matador, TX storm. Bowdle was way more impressive overall, but that seemed more a carved out meso than wall cloud specimen. (Tornado starting to materialize at center here.) #weatherphotography

It's just an artificial boundary, but I have a fondness for stuff that lights up in the Oklahoma Panhandle. I've only logged four chases there, including this one that, I guess didn't have a heavy enough anvil for that crawler. Near Hardesty, April 23rd this year. #weatherphotography #okwx

Rock stack & Milky Way south of Winslow, AZ, a few months ago. Phoenix blazing 100 miles away on the right side with maybe a bit of Payson overlapped. And then guessing that's Heber-Overgaard on the left. #nightscape #astrophotography

Took a chance of seeing the aurora last night and was rewarded with a brief appearance between 0220–0240 UTC (1920–1940 MST). Taken at Ashurst Lake east of Flagstaff AZ at latitude 35.01°N. Bonus: meteor (probably a Geminid) with fading aurora. #astrophotography #aurora @tamithaskov.bsky.social

A prairie rattlesnake and some globemallow near Twin Arrows, AZ, a few years ago right in the early thick of the pandemic when it was less concerning sidling up to random rattlers than random people.

Four minutes before the dust whirls became obvious, exceedingly thin needles materialized to the right of the rfd dump. South of Littlefield, Texas, April 25, 2025 — 2256Z. For the 2 or 3 plains chasers that somehow see my posts here, did any of you catch these closer/more clearly?

Gaia GPS. Took too long to land on this. Til now soo much time got spent with county parcel viewers determining public/private land or arcgis surface geology to work out nightscapes/rockhounding sites, then plotting scouting ops/successes separately in Google Maps. More gpx sites to move over still.

2025 wound up pretty solid for tornadoes with 13 across 7 days. A couple powerflash-QLCSnadoes, another QLCS in the rear-viewnado, one dusty Mississippi dust bowl, a distant wedgy Sandhiller, & 3 dusty spinups fleshed out most of it. But at least 4 or 5 solid contenders were in there. #stormchasing

Turned up another burst sprites in a time lapse from April 23rd this year, north of Guyman, Oklahoma. They're not coming from the foreground storm, but something way further back. That made two decent ones from that night, swimming in all the green airglow. #sprites #weatherphotography

A churning LP west of Wink, Texas, earlier this year—April 26th. The light was great. The landscape was, 'eh'. It emerged in great shape after a collision with a left mover as it moved southeast and dished a great time lapse. #txwx #weatherphotography

November lightning. North Phoenix Wednesday night. I'll take it. Needs terrain. #azwx #weatherphotography

I wasn't in Phoenix for storms yesterday, but that changed in a snap after heading outdoors & seeing constant lightning over tops of buildings and a coherent cell on radar. Really glad to find this handy patch of unbuilt desert nearby to watch it move in. #weatherphotography #azwx

Another from last night when finer detail was erupting behind the Peaks. It was absolutely on fire at that point. Vertical geometry corrected this time to better show how the pillars splayed outward toward the edges instead of all being parallel straight up. #northernlights #nightscape

A slice of what we got over the San Francisco Peaks and Mt. Elden from Buffalo Park, Flagstaff tonight around 9:45PM/0445Z. I really struggled to process this one. I am also tired. The brighter yellow-orange pillars appeared white-ish to my eye as it was happening. #astrophotography #auroraborealis

Imaging comet Lemmon on October 23rd. I was planning to focus stack the sky with the astro rig as it was shooting the comet. But then kind of preferred the soft focus sky with all the star color and Corona Borealis arcing beautifully at upper right. So indecisively posting both:) #astrophotography

That one time back in April, giving Tennessee storm chasing a shot. Try as one may to stick to farmland in the delta, the better storms are going to go where they want. Which means trees & highway overpasses. Glad to have experienced that, but not high on my wish-to-revisit list. #weatherphotography

C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) from last night. It is a really good telescopic target right now! Lots more detail throughout the tail but especially close to the coma with streamers fanning out inside the dust tail. Interesting to see the turquoise coma breezing off to the right a bit too. #astrophotography

C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) with Arcturus blazing just above the horizon tonight. Naked eye, roughly 2° of the tail was visible compared to 5° in 15x70 binoculars and more like 8° in this shot. The heavy airglow was visible naked eye too as the comet dipped deeper into it. #astrophotography #comet

An abrupt tail disconnect with comet Lemmon Friday night. Almost didn't catch it in time to get in frame. The tail is streaming away fast. Frame by frame you can watch all of that breezing away from the comet 3-4 times faster than the comet is orbiting off to the left. #astrophtography #comet

Wide view of C/2025 R2 SWAN, M16, M17 and M24 dunking into the San Francisco Peaks and airglow Friday night. A bit of fall color showing up on those hills...along with a bright pumice mine. #astrophotography #comet

Two swans and an eagle. Comet SWAN—C/2025 R2—is drifting through the Milky Way now. Last night it drifted by M16/the Eagle Nebula and M17/the Swan Nebula. Lots of love already for comet colors, but that bumps up a few notches when a bright nebula or two are nearby. #astrophotography #comet

Once the last bit of twilight is gone, you might think, aha, maximum contrast! But then the blazing airglow says, aha, no! Tail shows up better at this point, but can’t pull it out any further with all the intervening ripples. Even with that, I still like what airglow does for a scene.

C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) at the beginning of astronomical twilight tonight. I could just barely make it out naked eye as a soft spot above left of Cor Caroli. I'm biding my time a bit on processing the telescopic shots, but it looks like there was a cool tail disconnect in progress. #astrophotography

I need to shoot twilight starscapes more often—not just when comets are trying to hide within. Can you spot it? Second pic points the way. C/2025 R2 (SWAN) Thursday evening. Not an obvious one like NEOWISE or Tsuchinshan-ATLAS recently. But I do have hopes for Lemmon soon. #comet #astrophotography

And then there's the other bright comet, C/2025 R2 (SWAN). Nice that it's an evening object, but it's still in heavy twilight + gibbous moon + horizon loving clouds. So definitely not as detailed as Lemmon the morning before. 1.5° tail looks yellowish—so maybe dust, not ion. #comet #astrophotography

Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) from wayyy too early Thursday morning with all the good comet colors in the coma, dust & ion tails—with that stretching 6° in the uncropped original. It should keep getting better over the next few weeks and finally make it's way to the evening sky. A more tolerable place.

West of Flagstaff this afternoon. The search for structure worked out reasonably well. Better at times than this, but the CG demanded this moment be highlighted. #weatherphotography #stormchasing #azwx

I’d say this tour group got their money’s worth! I had planned to be driving home that day, but forecast instability & boundary options convinced me to hang around another day. SPC wasn’t too impressed though until 20Z as things started happening. May 1, 2025, Briggs, TX. #stormchasing

Coming up Friday night and really looking forward to it! 5:30PM, September 19th, from Flagstaff, AZ, the first International Dark Sky City. Workshop at the Astrogeology Science Center with a field session afterward just down the road in Buffalo Park. www.eventbrite.com/e/night-sky-...

Not enough time to haul off to a spot with a lower horizon, but the brief aurora display still lofted the tree tops at the end of astronomical twilight. East side of Flagstaff 35°N. 8:04 PM MST/0304Z. #northernlights #nightscape

Zodiacal Light blazing among the cinder cones north of Flagstaff. I love the depth showing up in scenes like this. Beyond the foreground lie ripples of airglow, further out the dust of our solar system slicing through and enveloping Jupiter & Venus, all atop a Milky Way backdrop. #nightscape