On Saturday evening I set up my wildlife camera running overnight to check for rats near the house after my wife spotted one in the garden. I didn’t see any rats but did catch some aspects of the thunderstorm that passed across early in the night. This shows the scene:
The next frame (I was using a 5-second time-lapse) caught the garden being illuminated by the lightning:
The whole garden was illuminated by the lightning which seemed to be high in the clouds rather then striking the ground – we watched some of the storm through a window. The illumination was just like daylight. The camera was running all night and it caught several instances of the lightning lighting the landscape. Perhaps with another storm I will set the camera on a faster time-lapse to try and show the storm better.
A few minutes later it started to rain:
In this view you can see the rain drops wetting the paving slabs. Then the rain came down hard wetting everything:
What is interesting in this view is the camera lamps illuminating the falling rain. The rain isn’t falling all in one direction, it is at different angles. This effect showed in all the images which recorded the falling rain. This answered a puzzle I had with one of the earlier overnight recordings where I had these streaks on many of the photos – there must have been some light rain that night.
Towards the end of the night I noticed that some snails were returning ‘home’. The most obvious snail is the one near the top crossing the edging from the lawn. But in the middle of the frame is one climbing down the wall and a third right at the bottom crossing the paving:
This is a simple ‘GIF’ animation from 30 frames. I need to work out how to take close-up views with this camera and to get video working on this website…