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Hey, watch where you're pointing that thing! I'm on my way to the NE panhandle(probably in it by now) and see this ahead of me. I'm like what the hell is that. Oh crap it's a tank! Saw some new hummers as well, one with a red cross thing on the side. At least I think that is what it was. They might have been those H2 or H3 or whatever. I wasn't paying that much attention. And I also saw a few camouflaged vehicles.
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I'm now north of Bridgeport Nebraska. This storm wasn't doing too well until right now. It finally flared up on radar and took a hard right turn. I was like, thank you! Since it was about to split the two highways out there and meander across no-mans-land sandhills. It was quite annoying trying to beat it before it crossed this n-s highway. Freaking one lane road construction on a Sunday afternoon north of Sidney. Sunday. Sat there waiting for quite a while. It's soooooooooooo annoying to drive that far and have something like that come between you and a storm intercept, especially when that one intercept might be the only decent view you get of the thing.
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Long curling gust front overhead. The storm went from going ene to se right now.
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I'd guess there's a fair bit of hail up there. It had just shot up to 65-70 dbz on radar, if only briefly.
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A bit of a lowering can be seen up there in the notch, right of that sign. It looked like it would go se and cross the highway se out of Bridgeport now, so back that way I went. I followed it east for a good while, from further away. Looked like an updraft popped up to its west and smacked it a little. This took it off its nice rightward turn and sent it eastward again....not good. So now it moved east, right between the highways out there, and my highway actually went more se than anything. Worse yet was it was no longer deviant. It looked ok for a while, then slowly went down hill. Game over. So I drove east, planning to get a room in Ogallala, which I did. There were storms further east, but too far to bother for lightning. I was just about to go to sleep, around 10:30, when I looked out the bathroom window and saw a tower flicker just se of me. I then watched it some more, and nothing. Hmmmm. Then flicker again. Fine I thought, I'll go out. The funny thing was, I was only looking out the bathroom window because there were no shades in there. Just this odd glass textured so you couldn't see through it, just barely. I had found it odd and had to look out to see what was even out there. That was the only reason I even looked out. And that lone flicker happened at just the right time. It was still very inactive at that point, but was enough to alert me something was there. Had I not been looking out, I'd have went to sleep never knowing anything was going on or about to.
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Storm under the stars se of Ogallala.
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Make that two storms.
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As the lightning with these faded some, I noticed a lot of activity to my sw and could soon hear the thunder from it. So I went back into the city to try for some close bolts.
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The area of CGs moved just se of me. The damn wind and sprinkles were getting the best of me anyway. I was parked under and behind an overhang. Even so, the wind was blowing rain in my window.
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I move back east a bit and shoot to the east as that area moved up more. There was a truck stop to the left. A lady can be seen standing over there. I thought she was watching the lightning, but her dog was going potty out there somewhere. Since he was moving he doesn't show up.
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Probably a 3 minute exposure.
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There were bolts in almost all directions now. The storms were pathetic, but those are often the best for cloud to ground bolts.
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I screwed this up. I stopped down to F8 I think, which was too far for these bolts. I wanted a bunch of them and thought I had to stop down that far for a longer shutter. The picture just has the underexposed look to it. The streaks of light at the bottom are cars on I80.
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