This picture is absolutely not posted for its technical merit (note… capturing extremely bright lava exploding out of a pitch black mountain is a tricky balancing act. I’ll have to work on that one!) but it does illustrate the immense size of the explosion of lava that we witnessed on Thanksgiving night. If you compare the lava with the tiny lights of the towns below, you get a sense of just how amazingly large the eruption was. The mountain started erupting in the late afternoon and continued to spew lava for several hours.