GRAND RAPIDS, MI — The tranquility of a warm summer night in West Michigan was interrupted by an ominous sight to behold.
The sun was setting Monday, around 9:30 p.m. or so, when a series of bright flashes began illuminating an increasingly dark sky north of Grand Rapids.
There, moving quickly across the sky, was what appeared to be a thin, dark cloud spewing lightning every few seconds as it roared east.
A small thunderstorm had formed, that thin "shelf cloud" backlit in an eerie but fascinating way by the setting sun.
MLive photojournalist Chris Clark captured the brief episode on video (above) near Little Pine Island Lake, in Comstock Park.
The footage shows the shelf cloud moving through, and from his vantage point it appears to be firing off lightning bolts as it rolls past.
Also watching, miles away from his front porch, was Walt Felver, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids.
The shelf cloud, Felver explain, was not actually giving off the lightning. Such clouds are "outflow" from thunderstorms, bringing more wind than anything else, he said.
"Shelf clouds can look menacing, but generally aren't," Felver said.
Instead, the cloud-to-cloud lightning of Monday night was part of the larger thunderstorm that blew threw. It was a harmless storm, more show than action.
"It had a lot of things going for it," Felver said, of the storm's being framed with a setting sun and otherwise serene evening.
"It was just after sunset, 9:30, quarter of ten," he added, "so you had some pretty good low light that was filtering underneath."