[To] the right side of the island...you can see a lightning strike!
I took this photo one evening while Jill and I were in Maui for our honeymoon. We were eating dinner on our lanai. We slowly watched as the sunset, and then clouds started to form out over the ocean as the sky darkened. That's when the show started. Out at sea a storm had broken out and flashes of lightning filled the sky.
I grabbed my tripod and set it up in the hopes of capturing my first photo with a lightning strike. I started with a two second shutter speed. My first few attempts were unsuccessful, so I amped it up to a 30 second shutter speed. That did the trick. This photo is one of the last ones that I took. If you look to the right side of the island,--which is silhouetted by the lightning--, you can see a lightning strike! The island in the photo is Kaho'olawe.
Kaho'olawe was once a part of the "mega-island" of Maui Nui. This consisted of Maui, Lana'i, Moloka'i, and Kaho'olawe. It was 50% larger than the island of Hawai'i! That was 1.2 million years ago. Since then the islands have split from one another, and Kaho'olawe is the smallest of the eight volcanic islands of Hawai'i. It sits about 7 miles off the coast of South Maui.
The island has been sparsely populated through the years due to the lack of fresh water. The early inhabitants of the Hawaiian islands would oftentimes use Kaho'olawe as a temporary fishing settlement, but there were rarely permanent residents on the island. During World War II the U.S. military used the island as a training ground. This continued after the war, and until 1990, live fire training continued on the island.
[The] U.S. military used the island as a training ground.
The lightning in this photo is cloud to cloud lightning.
Let's pivot to the subject of this photo, the thunderstorm that developed over the island of Kaho'olawe. The lightning strike that was captured in this photo is a great example of cloud to cloud lightning. This form of lightning occurs when the bolt of electricity moves between two or more separate clouds. Other types of lightning that can be seen in this photo include intra-cloud lightning, which is surprisingly the most common type. Lightning comes in five other forms: cloud to ground, cloud to air, bolt from the blue, anvil lightning, and heat lightning.
Lightning forms when electrical charges within a cloud separate. The base of the cloud becomes negatively charged, while the top of the cloud becomes positively charged. The movement of the charges from either the clouds to the ground, clouds to other clouds, or within the same cloud is how lightning occurs.
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