In The Vortex

Author: David Drummond

  • 2010 Perseids Meteor Shower

    I decided last night to try my hand for the first time to really take a serious starfield picture, and in that process hoped maybe to capture a Perseids Meteor.  I was out for about 3 hours taking dozens of images with my Canon digital SLR.  While I was out I saw between 30 and 40 meteors.  I was rather disappointed as I was hoping for more from all accounts I had read on what was expected.  The area in West Texas where I was has exceptional viewing and according to the light pollution maps is in the second darkest areas. Nonetheless, the overall amount I saw wasn’t that much, with many of them being faint.  I didn’t see any really bright ones and no fireballs.

    What I did learn was that I have a lot to learn and a lot of practice ahead, so there is much room for improvement.  That said I did catch one of the brighter meteors and got one other star trail image that I liked, so I thought I would share those with you here. 🙂

    You can click on the images to get a bit larger one.

  • 05/19/10 Storm Chase Forecast

    Another potent day on tap for most of Western OK and down in to parts of North Central Texas as a dryline will move to along the eastern TX Panhandle/OK state line, and a warm from is lifting north across Oklahoma.

    The warm front is currently situated along the I40 corridor with what we call a triple point (where the warm front intersects the dryline) currently in the vicinity of Wheeler County, TX.

    The northward extent of severe weather will be tempered by the eventual location of the warm front by mid-late afternoon, but even farther south along the dryline, isolated monster supercells capable of extreme size hail larger than baseballs, strong tornadoes and damaging winds will still be possible.  Storms following the warm front in particular should be especially dangerous!

    Today has the potential to be yet another tornado outbreak for much of Oklahoma and even parts of North Central Texas.  Everyone have your weather radios on today and pay attention to local media sources.   Storms will be moving much slower today than they did during the last outbreak on Monday, which means you may have more lead time on warnings, but this unfortunately also means that giant hail and tornadoes will have more time over a given area to do more damage.

    I’ll be heading out the door shortly for far western Oklahoma, and will be streaming LIVE this afternoon on the LIVE ChaseCam, with AUDIO!