OK, I left Los Alamos Thursday night and drove up to Colorado for some mountain climbing. Almost died Friday... here are the trip reports:

Mt. Elbert and Grays & Torreys.

On the way home there was a lot of really photogenic weather. I didn't get a chance to photograph much of it, but I finally did stop to catch this sunset and then make a first stab at lightning photography. The lightning shots didn't really work because the full moon was only 10 degrees away in the sky. It was illuminating the thunderhead and making long exposures impossible. In order to get the lightning to show up against the clouds, I had to use really short exposures and the odds of me catching a bolt dropped to basically nothing.

One interesting note: If the moon had been about 1/4 day behind in its cycle, it would have risen 10 minutes earlier and the result would have been fantastic. In this picture you can see the thunderhead before the sun had set. The shadow of the Earth quickly moved up this cloud until just the very top bit was bright pink. About 30 seconds after the last bit of color had faded, the full moon rose right up above the center of it. It was really spectacular, but would have been infinitely better had the moon risen while the cloud was still illuminated by the sun. Ten minutes would have made all the difference.