Snoopy was a monitoring station that provided valuable night

photography for the project.  It is no longer in operation.

Images and text are copyrighted.  Copying is prohibited

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Doll Face and her pet, Owloween, stand guard to keep birds from using Snoopy's solar panels as roosting places.

Winter 2007 brings a chill to Owloween and Doll Face

Notice the clarity of this picture taken shortly before midnight with help of a little moonlight.

West Texas has spectacular lightning storms.

More spectacular lightning.

Lightning.

Lightning.

Lightning.

Lightning.

Lightning.

And more lightning.

This is the largest and brightest meteor ever recorded by Roofus or Snoopy but high intensity light settings on the camera have caused the image to bloom making the meteor look bigger and brighter than it actually is.  Blooming effects can be seen in other Black and White images at this website whenever the light source is sufficiently bright (in general, any source bright enough to have a negative magnitude)That includes lightening as well as the brightest stars and planets.

Snoopy Sprite Sample

Sprites are short term electrical events associated with some thunderstorms.  They start at the top of our atmosphere (approximately 70-75 km high) and propagate rapidly (in milliseconds) downward into cloud tops of the initiating storm.  Apparently they also proceed upward into the ionosphere at the same time.  Below is a brief sampling out of approximately 125 sprites captured by Snoopy in September 2006.  They are of interest to those engaged in researching storm behavior so we routinely furnish them to FMA Research in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Snoopy ML

The following photograph taken by Snoopy June 14, 2007 (UT date) shows an ML in close to the monitoring station and moving fairly fast.  Stack depth was set to 64 images which is equivalent to a time exposure of approximately 2.1 seconds.  Direction of travel is probably right to left but the opposite direction is also possible.  There are no roads in this location.  Snoopy is located on a hill and this ML is passing by at a lower altitude.

These are just samples of fascinating pictures captured by Roofus and Snoopy night after night.  Coming to a video soon.