'Earthshine' sheds light on the moon's night side during conjunction

I went outside my friends' house Saturday night and saw these two celestial objects setting in the western sky. Jupiter and the moon came close together for a conjunction. Only a crescent of the moon was illuminated by the sun's direct light. The rest of the natural satellite, however, was lit by "earthshine," or sunlight that bounces off Earth, then hits the moon.

A lucky rainbow

I'm clearly getting behind on posting, so I'm just going throw things out there. This was a rainbow that formed around 6 p.m. one recent day. I had been inside all day up until that point because I had been sick and home from work. It was pure coincidence that I left my apartment for the first time just as the full rainbow formed. Luck helps in photography sometimes. ... Too bad there's an ugly apartment complex in the foreground.

Anvils and crescents

On the evening of Sept. 29, several large thunderstorms popped up over the center of Florida. Their anvil clouds combined with a sunset and a setting moon to make for a colorful spectacle. The above photo shows the crescent moon and the edge of an anvil.

I've been lazy in the photo-taking department recently, so all of these ones were taken without the aid of a tripod. So they might be grainy and blurry. Sorry.

Here's a better view of an anvil, with my lovely apartment complex in the foreground. These clouds are especially ominous when there are few other random clouds floating around in the sky, which was the case on this evening. It's a stark contrast.

This shows the meeting point of two anvils.

I also drove briefly to the east, where a separate phenomenon was created by the anvils in the west. When such large clouds break up the rays from a setting sun, anticrepuscular rays tend to appear off to the east. These rays appear to be emanating from the eastern horizon, but they're actually coming from the setting sun in the west (of course) and are being bent by Earth's curvature.

You gonna recycle that water?

Central Florida's rainy season is coming to a close, which reminded me of a photo I neglected to share when I took it. This shows my workplace, Florida Today in northern Melbourne. I swear, the building is 90 percent glass, which is downright birdbrained in Florida. Pretty much every window, especially the skylights above the building's longest hallway, leaks. That's why these recycling bins are set up along the entire span: to catch the invading droplets. This sight provides a chuckle every wet season.

Finally, a decent lightning storm while I'm not at work

I walked out of work Friday evening and checked the radar on my iPhone. It showed a big, almost stationary blob of red just to the west of Cocoa. Seemed like a good photo op for stormy clouds and lightning. The above is a composite of a few lightning photos I took over a 15-minute period at the Lone Cabbage Fish Camp on the St. Johns River.

I started the evening at a park on the north side of State Road 520, which runs westward into a remote, swampy area. It had a good view of this gust front, with a somewhat red post-sunset sky in the background.

I switched to a park on the south side of State Road 520 so I could get a better view of the storm's structure. The lightning was flashing frequently, highlighting the striations in this shelf cloud. Visible bolts, however, were few and far between until the storm got closer.

This shot shows a lightning strike, but the area of the bolt is overexposed, so you can't make it out.

The green, white and red lights on an airboat that went by oddly made an Italian flag over the river's surface. Weird, huh?

I went back over to the north side of the roadway, where there seemed to be a better view of the lightning bolts.

The storm was painfully slow in moving eastward toward my location. I'm betting its clip was less than 5 mph.

I always try to focus on power towers, since they're tall, and lightning loves tall things. This was never struck, however.

It eventually started sprinkling, and since I was exhausted from a long workweek, I called it an evening.