Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn't going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.



I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here's the best edit I've produced so far:

Seasons of Topaz

Seasons of Topaz, my latest time-lapse video,with "Sierra Wave" lenticular clouds, pogonip ice fog, rain, snow, sunrises, sunsets... a year's worth of weather in 3 minutes: http://youtu.be/W07_Yol2Ad4


The music, used with permission, is "Odyssey" (instrumental version) by The Wyld, as heard in the McDonald's commercials during the Sochi Winter Olympics.  Drop by their Web site for links to their social media pages where you can say "Hi": http://thewyldmusic.com/