I took this photo on June 19th at Huntington Beach where I monitor endangered birds every Tuesday morning. I really liked the way the photo came out and vowed to find the surfer with the long hair and give him a copy. Several weeks have passed and I still had not seen him on the beach. Since the birds have all fledged, today is the last I'll be heading down to the beach to watch them. As my friend and I are getting out of my car to start our two hour walk to monitor the birds, I see the long-haired surfer loading his van with his distinctive surfboard. He's there with the other guy in the photo, his wife and two kids. I try desperately to find the photo on my phone but cannot so I approach him anyways and tell him about it. I say if he gives me his email address I'll email the pic to him. He says cool, he'd like that very much. He then inquires about our role in saving an endangered bird so we tell him about the program and other birds we monitor as well. He said he has a home in Costa Rica and a turtle sanctuary and release center on both coasts of the country. Would we be interested in being a volunteer in Costa Rica helping bring back the numbers of Leatherback and Green turtles to the world? My friend Tina and I look at each other and say, heck yes! Who knows ... We may be living in Costa Rica for a while sometime in the future. But for the time being, I'll stay local and continue to take beach photos. :-) This post was edited by jodi_in_so_calif on Tue, Aug 20, 13 at 20:43

I love meerkats!!! They are so adorable! Every once in a while my little dog sticks her head up out of her deep dog bed with her ears up and I tell her she is doing her meerkat look lol. Great pictures!

Gigantic Jet Lightning over China Image Credit & Copyright: Phebe Pan Explanation: That's no meteor. While watching and photographing this year's Perseid Meteor Shower, something unexpected happened: a gigantic jet erupted from a nearby cloud. The whole thing was over in a flash -- it lasted less than a second -- but was fortunately captured by an already-recording digital camera. Gigantic jets are a rare form of lightning recognized formally only a few years ago. The featured high resolution color image, taken near the peak of Shikengkong mountain in China, may be the best image yet of this unusual phenomenon. The same event appears to have been captured simultaneously by another photographer, further away. The gigantic jet appears to start somewhere in a nearby thundercloud and extend upwards towards Earth's ionosphere. The nature of gigantic jets and their possible association with other types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) such as blue jets and red sprites remains an active topic of research.

Aurora over Icelandic Fault Image Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN, Earth and Stars) Explanation: Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. Exactly this week in 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event. A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME. What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged last week over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.