Rainbows After Lightning

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is opening its doors from 6-9pm this summer. I’m not surprised; I imagine they have a hard time drumming up patrons during the normal hours where folks can walk outside in the 110 degree southern Arizona sun. By 6pm, however, the sun is beginning to set, it’s cooling off by a few degrees and it’s arguably safe to take one’s family so we made that argument. The following pictures are from two separate weeks however, the second week I went with upgraded equipment. Comparison at the end!

Both weeks we’ve gone, storms have blown through the west side of Tucson. The first week was quite beautiful. As a storm began to roll in, we were given rainbow that just happened to arc around this Mountain Yucca. I tried to pull some of the colors out a bit more but the dust in the air made the segmentation difficult.

The sun caught the clouds at just the right angle to turn the majority of the sky bright pink with small opening where some blue poked through. This photo is cropped and the colors enhanced but only slightly. Way off in the distance you can just see the mountains that are, I believe, the western most ones on the Tohono O’Odham Nation Reservation. Though if someone else knows for sure, a comment would be appreciated. This arm-less saguaro seems to stand overlooking this valley. I’d be curious to know where this sunset ranks among all the sunsets it has seen.

The desert museum has a hummingbird aviary. This Anna’s Hummingbird seemed like it had a bum wing. When it landed on this branch, one wing would hang a little different from the other. It didn’t seem to make a difference in its flight; from my perspective he could still zoom around pretty happily.

This Rufous Hummingbird really likes this branch. He’s a creature of habit. The picture on the left is from our first week at the museum while the image on the right is our second. The exposure settings of the two photos don’t create an apples-to-apples comparison of the cameras but it does show that I learned to make the bird stand out a bit more by adjusting my angle slightly and blurring the background. I also like that the dead leaf (that matches his color) was there both weeks. It’s almost as if he intentionally placed it there to enjoy the same way I would hang a photo in my house.

This post is a bit longer but I figured the name demanded an explanation. Both weeks at the museum the storms and lightning put on a show for us. We were encouraged to take shelter while at the museum. The CDC says there is less than a 1 in a million chance of being struck by lightning and 90% of those are nonfatal. My wife and I like to put things like that into perspective. So we found that the CDC also reports that the odds of being injured on or near a toilet are 4.1 in 100,000. Math tells me that I’m more than 41 times more likely to be hurt near or on a toilet than being struck by lightning and since I am near a toilet many more times a day than I am lightning…suffice to say we did not take shelter.

On our way back from the museum, my three year old was at the point of exhaustion where she was just singing to keep herself awake. The lyrics of this impromptu composition were “rainbows come after the lighting”. I did get her to quiet down and fall asleep by telling her that if she was quiet and looked outside, she might just see another rainbow – mind you, it was about 8:30pm and quite dark outside. As a parent, sometimes you have to do whatever works…