Tornado Alley Trailer (HD)

Filmmaker Sean Casey has been chasing tornadoes for more than a decade. And it takes one tough ride to get in and out of the violent storms safely.

We met up with the storm chaser this week at The Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif., where his Imax film, Tornado Alley, opens today.

Driving directly into violent storms with an Imax camera, Casey attempts to document a high-definition view of a direct hit from an F3 tornado, giving moviegoers a large-format view of one of nature's most violent displays. (F3 tornadoes are considered severe and characterize a storm with winds of 158 mph to 206 mph.)

To accomplish this, he's built a custom, bunker-like, 14,000-pound storm-chasing truck that is armored with layers of steel and Kevlar. Tucked safely inside, he aims to plant himself and his team directly in the path of these spectacular storms.

His second-generation Tornado Intercept Vehicle, the TIV2 shown here, has been built to withstand the worst. In this slideshow, we take a tour of some of the technology used to capture this unprecedented footage--and make sure everyone makes it out unharmed.

Cassini and Amateur Astronomers Chase massive Storm On Saturn

With the help of amateur astronomers, the composite infrared spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken its first look at a massive blizzard in Saturn's atmosphere. The instrument collected the most detailed data to date of temperatures and gas distribution in that planet's storms.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up loads of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard in this year's Washington, D.C.-area storm front nicknamed "Snowmageddon."

"We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs," said Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Normally, he said, "Data from the storm cell would have been averaged out."

Cassini's radio and plasma wave instrument and imaging cameras have been tracking thunder and lightning storms on Saturn for years in a band around Saturn's mid-latitudes nicknamed "storm alley." But storms can come and go on a time scale of weeks, while Cassini's imaging and spectrometer observations have to be locked in place months in advance.

The radio and plasma wave instrument regularly picks up electrostatic discharges associated with the storms, so team members have been sending periodic tips to amateur astronomers, who can quickly go to their backyard telescopes and try to see the bright convective storm clouds.

Amateur astronomers including Anthony Wesley, Trevor Barry and Christopher Go got one of those notices in February and were able to take dozens of pictures over the next several weeks.

In late March, Wesley, an amateur astronomer from Australia who was actually the first person to detect the new dark spot caused by an impact on Jupiter last summer, sent Cassini scientists an e-mail with a picture of the storm.

"I wanted to be sure that images like these were being seen by the Cassini team just in case this was something of interest to be imaged directly by Cassini or the Hubble Space Telescope," Wesley wrote.