I'm "borrowing" a granddaughter for a few days. She's old enough now that we can do some things together (making her some earrings), and she can appreciate a trip to my favorite nature center to look for swans, cranes, egrets, eagles, turtles, deer, herons, water lilies, and whatever else there we might be able to find. She's also old enough to have her own cell phone and use its camera. I planned to give her some tips, as well as lots of opportunities to try to use them. She's got the technical stuff down, but I was trying to get her to do some horizontal shots for wide subjects, or zoom in before clicking instead of cropping afterwards to get a full(er) and less pixelated screen shot.
She soon tired of that, so we had supper and she returned to her cell for non-photo reasons. After a few minutes I wondered why planes were flying overhead. The sun was shining, so surely it wasn't constant thunder? I stepped outside and not only was the thunder louder and non-stop, but I was getting pelted by the first onslaught of rain. As soon as I was back inside, I noted hail hitting the neighbor's roof and bouncing down its slope and into the grass.
I called her in the room I was in to see it before it stopped, and then we went to the other side of the house since the cloud was moving in that direction. Besides there is a covered porch on that side for our protection. Even more hail was falling on that side of the house, and with a metal roof over that porch, was loud enough to keep her jumping until she realized she was still protected. We watched it bouncing off several roofs, and both grabbed cameras to see what we could capture.
Suddenly she cried, "There's a rainbow!" Both our cameras pointed in that direction, and I shot some video trying to include both hail and a rainbow in the same sequence. It didn't seem to be working, and the hail was letting up. I lowered my camera enough to pay more attention to the rainbow and discovered it was now in fact a double!
I grabbed a still shot, noting later a few pieces of hail still stuck on the neighbor's roof peak. There was also time to notice that the space between the rainbows was the darkest part of the sky, as if rainbows stole light from their surroundings so they could paint the sky in all their colors.
It didn't last long, the hail was over, and we both retreated back into the house. I went to pull out my laptop for a radar view of what else might be coming our way. Only now, finally after all the action was past, were the town sirens going off. Was more on the way? Worse?
Radar showed us as getting poured on, orange and red with a trace of green covered the screen. It just wasn't raining any more however. Radar is goofy around here, showing rain where it won't hit for at least 5 more minutes, or not showing this while I checked it before the hail hit to see if the rumble was weather or aviation created. Now it was working, and I expanded the view outward for a bigger picture of what lay in store.
Nothing.
Nada.
The one lone cloud in the entire state had landed on us and us alone, giving my granddaughter, at 11, her first ever rainbow in a real sky. She'd had hail before, and shared a couple stories. Only now, not just her first rainbow, but a double!
I can't wait to see what the rest of her visit has in store for her!
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