Squall Line

About half an hour before dinner,  I saw the moon up high and decided to take a look at it with one of my telescopes.  I got the scope and mount out of the garage and set it up in the side yard.  I ran down to the basement and got my eyepiece case, and then used a low power eyepiece to find the moon.  I went to change to a higher power eyepiece, to see the craters in more detail, and suddenly the moon was gone!  There were some light clouds overhead moving in, so I looked to the north to see what was coming, and saw THIS!  The leading edge of a squall line.  So I quickly ran in the house, grabbed my camera, and jumped in the car and drove down the street to the beach where I could get a better view of the sky to the north.

Yikes, this was unbelievable!  Look at this cloud at the leading edge of a cold front.  I have left the color balance as the camera saw it.  It was getting dark and all the photographs have a bluish tint to them.

As the leading edge of the front moved over, there were a few sprinkles, and I looked back up the street and saw that the cloud looked like this from underneath.  It's not a tornado, but it looks like one from this view.  I am so glad I was able to react quickly and get this passage before it was gone.  I checked the timing on the photographs, and these three photographs were takin in the space of four minutes!