Jesse Gets Lucky With Central PA Storms

UPDATE: You can see my rainbow and weird sunset photos below.

ORIGINAL REPORT: We had two storms come through State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] this afternoon... the first one around 4:30 I missed, though our Wichita office was nice enough to send us two screenshots of it courtesy AccuWeather SelectWarn, our TV weather display system. Between 5:00 and 5:30 a second storm came by, mainly on the south side of town where I live (download* radar and lightning movie from AccuWeather.com RadarPlushere).

I did what I usually do - left two cameras recording videos on the porch as the storm moved over my house. Reviewing the movies, I was disappointed to see over 20 minutes of footage with not a single lightning strike... then I came across THIS:

This is, hands down, the best lightning picture I've taken with my Kodak Z650 camera. And by "picture" I actually mean "frame from a video" because it was a Quicktime movie (I'll have a slow-mo version of the video tomorrow morning, you can download* the full-res movie here). I know, I could get higher quality pictures with a more expensive manual camera, but you can't beat sticking this thing on a tripod and setting it out on the porch to record the storm for half an hour.

I was also treated to a faint rainbow and a strange sunset under heavy rain. It was eerie. Here are the pics:

MY LATEST PHOTOS IN OUR PHOTO GALLERY (PERMALINK TO THIS DAY'S PHOTOS):

Below I have used AccuWeather.com RadarPlus to plot out the lightning strikes during the storms (yellow = first storm, white = second storm). It's clear to see the strike that I saw - which, judging by the lat/lon that RadarPlus gave me, puts it near the end of Chestnut Street in Pine Grove Mills (interactive Yahoo Map showing strike location | static map showing my house and strike).

*Quicktime required. "Save Target As" required for IE.