A beautiful sunset over Texas. Unfortunately, this amazing scene was taken during the round of storms that created massive flooding around the Houston area. Not to worry, absolutely no problems at Ben & Beth's.

This is a radar estimate of the amount of rain that fell a few weeks before the next round of rain that actually caused all the flooding around the area.  I guess it's fortunate that the next system seemed to focus a little further South.  But add in the 6 inches that fell a day later and the area we live in received about 9 inches of rain in a very short amount of time. Some places received over 15 inches in the second storm alone!

Here's a scene looking down our street on June 22, 2006. A storm formed to the West, and while moving NE, expanded rapidly to us in the East. The clouds were rapidly churning and bubbling as they rolled overhead. The updrafts were also very strong, causing quick and visible condensation / evaporation. At the time of the picture, this storm had a bunch of hail in it, seen here as the sort of bluish/greenish hue just above the trees. Luckily, the storm lost a lot of energy as it neared, and only dropped rain in our area, amounting to another 2-3 inches.

After a few months of waiting for a storm to pass by at night, Ben finally gets his chance, and is lucky enough to have the camera pointed in the right direction! This bolt was between 1 -2 miles away.

That little spec that the high tech digitally enhanced arrow is pointing at is Mercury as it passes in front of the Sun. A fairly rare occasion, as this won't happen again for 10 years.  A sunspot can be seen on the left edge as well. Picture taken through a solar filter.

A severe thunderstorm warning for our area when this one was making it's way southeast, but lost of lot of it's power as it neared. Still put on quite a light show!

Not the site you want to see when you have a flight that's due to leave in a few hours. We were pretty lucky in 2006. This storm had a lot of hail in it (bluish hue towards the horizon), but lost a lot of strength as it neared.

As the storm (from above picture) neared, this concave cloud formation came into view. It stretched across the sky, and looked like we were under a wave in the ocean. Before the "wave" could get directly above us, the storm pretty much fell apart, the clouds began to even out, and it rained for 10 minutes or so.