That’s a rotating supercell!
And not just a rotating supercell, but one with insane structure and amazing movement that looks like alien spacecraft hanging over the Earth.
It took photographer Mike Olbinski four years to capture the formation of a colossal, spiraling supercell on video – but good grief, was it worth the wait. This footage is the very definition of spellbinding.
The footage is truly otherwordly. The lighting, the motion, the scale of it all. It’s absolutely sublime.
Olbinski has a knack for catching large-scale natural phenomena on film. In 2011, he shot a jawdropping timelapse of a massive Arizona dust storm. Watch it here:
This writes Olbinski about the thunderstorm forming near Booker Texas:
[quote_box_center] It took four years but I finally got it.
I’ve been visiting the Central Plains since 2010. Usually it’s just for a day, or three, or two…but it took until the fourth attempt to actually find what I’d been looking for. And boy did we find it.
This monster cloud was hanging over Texas and rotating like something out of Close Encounters. [/quote_box_center]
