Furious Activity High and Low

With the sky looking pretty clear at times yesterday afternoon I decided to take a few shots of the Sun as I knew there should be a batch of active Sunspots visible:



A reminder that you should never look directly at or try to photograph the Sun unless you use a solar filter designed for that purpose.

We had been 'promised' electrical storms would follow the recent high temperatures, which peaked here at 25C, and the forecasters were not wrong. This is a short video screen grab from the real time lightning maps at lightningmaps.org:



Quite an active evening with up to 160 strikes per minute over the country. I have the map set up to show strikes up to one hour old. Newest are yellow and as time passes the colour darkens.

Each new lightning strike (cloud to cloud or cloud to ground) shows as a red circle, the white circles show the movement of the sound wave (thunder). The site covers many parts of the world not just the UK. I was relieved and disappointed that the storms were nowhere near me.

Relieved as Penny really hates the thunder and I'm not over keen on close lightning strikes. Disappointed as there was no photo opportunity and I have a lightning detector outside which hasn't had a chance to prove it works as yet. It can detect lightning from about 25 miles away and an indoor display shows the number of strikes and whether the storm is moving closer, overhead, or moving away. (Not that I need any electronics to tell me an electrical storm is overhead!)