2005 Grand Island, Nebraska 'Super Cell', one in a series of photos by Mike Hollingshead.

There have been a lot of spring thunderstorms lately, so I wanted to post a link to some amazing storm photos. I really appreciate the power and presence of a large storm, like a huge spirit moving overhead.

Mike Hollingshead is a storm chaser who has become quite an accomplished photographer. He has a great site full of outstanding pictures of those huge, menacing storms one only finds on the Great Plains. Check out this guy’s work at Extreme Instability.

The Compact Muon Solenoid is one of six experiments inside the collider complex.

The Large Hadron Collider will fire up again in July, after repairs from an electrical failure in September. It will circulate the year’s first proton beam by this coming September.

“They’ll be even more perfect than before,” said Bob Cousins, deputy to the scientific leader of the CMS experiment.

“The excitement’s building in a similar way that it was a year ago, and, in fact, everybody is working hard to be even more ready than we were a year ago,” Cousins said.

Total solar eclipse over Turkey, 2006.

by M. L. Rachell Berry 3/10/2009

One of my life’s goals is to experience a total solar eclipse. I’ve witnessed a couple of partial eclipses, but nothing can compare to the otherworldly mind-and-body-trip of standing in the point of totality. This event is so powerful that there are people who devote their lives to following solar eclipses around the earth, consulting astronomical calendars and booking hotels years in advance, going to wild lengths to get their fix…eclipse totality only happening over the Atlantic this year? No problem, just find a willing pilot and hover over the ocean for the most surreal three minutes of your life.

Dr. Andrew Weil, the well-known author of many health books and proponent of holistic medicine, is a self-proclaimed “eclipse freak”. He’s done much research into altered states of consciousness, and he believes experiencing the totality of a solar eclipse is an excellent way to achieve this. Here’s what he had to say about his first eclipse experience in his book The Marriage of the Sun and Moon:

“For some time the light had been fading ever more quickly. Then, with great drama, a nebulous darkness grew out of the west — the edge of the umbra, or cone of shadow, whose swift passage over the globe traces the path of the total solar eclipse…The vast sky of southern Mexico became the dome of a giant planetarium as an unseen hand turned down a cosmic rheostat. The town of Miahuatlan became a model railroad set at my feet, and I experienced a powerful sense of what psychiatrists call “derealization” — the feeling of external things becoming unreal and weird.

In the next instant, things really did get weird. Suddenly, the surface of the earth was covered by rippling bands of altering light and shadow: patterns generated by the interaction of light rays from the last remaining points of the disappearing solar crescent with the earth’s upper atmosphere. These “shadow bands” persisted for a timeless interval, absorbing my full attention. Then someone shouted “Look!” and I turned my gaze upward and saw for the first time in my life the corona of the sun.

High in the sky, for the sun was near the zenith when the moon overtook it, was a black disk — surrounding it, a blaze of silver light of unearthly beauty. The sky was not very dark. A glowing twilight prevailed, with a 360-degree rim of light around the horizon, giving a strong impression of being under a dome. Mercury and Venus were in brilliant view, but the light of the corona was too bright for other stars to be visible….

After all the dramatic changes of accelerating intensity, everything stopped: There was an improbable sense of peace and equilibrium. Time did not flow. I have no way of comparing those three-and-a-half minutes of clock time to any other three-and-a-half minute interval I have experienced.

…For hours afterward, everyone I saw on the streets wore a radiant smile. People were high, and it showed in their faces.”

Here in America, we’re due for our next solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. The best experience is to be had in western Kentucky near the Illinois and Tennessee borders, where maximum duration of the eclipse will be 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Not soon enough for you? Heartbreakingly for me, the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century will be THIS YEAR on July 22, and the maximum eclipse duration of 6 minutes and 43 seconds will occur far off the coast in the Pacific Ocean. So, cruise ship, anyone?

For more dates, planning, and information, check out Eclipse Chasers, where the bastards are very excited about the longest freaking eclipse of the 21st century. I’m sure it’ll be some party out there off the coast of Japan.