Ultra slow motion lightning strike

[Farmhand]

Found this on youtube -YouTube - ‪Slow Motion Video of a Multiple Tower Upward Lightning Flash on 6/16/10‬‎ 9000 frames in one second wow.

I've seen this before but not this good, it looks to me like the lightning bolt triggered a huge radiant energy event causing the lightning rods in the area to absorb the radiant energy into the ground. Maybe not, but it looks pretty anyway.

Anyone know whats actually happening with these upward strikes and streamers ?

[jibbguy]

It is essentially a giant plasma spark event, between two "electrodes"... I suspect the often-reported "ground to sky" propagation is about the atmosphere being slightly denser at ground level (or at one point in the sky verses another when it travels "across" clouds), than at the "other electrode"? If barometric pressure was totally "balanced".. would high-speed photography show it spontaneously forming across the entire gap? Dunno.

I do know, i no longer trust the "electrons flowing negative to positive" explanation i got in school to actually be true; and even if it was, it is absurd to consider getting ANY high speed camera to record something that is supposed to happen at a rate close to c

Ball Lightening is a much more interesting phenomena imo, we have hundreds of reports through the years (including my own Grandparents), where Ball Lightening will float around near the ground for severals seconds during a thunderstorm, or actually travel around inside a house, as happened with "Gramps and Grans", where a ball about a foot in diameter was seen coming out from behind a big old TV set (this was sometime in the 1950's), going right through the living room wall and floating down a hallway, producing bright light (the house electricity went off when it appeared), before finally dissipating... leaving not much visible damage either; except that the TV that was fried. Surprisingly, it did not singe the wood of the wall it went through, although the wires in the wall Mains plug behind the TV, where it apparently first came out from, were burned open. Changing the fuses got the rest of the House mains working again. This event was apparently caused by a lightening strike on a large old walnut tree that overhung the house, the trunk being about 10 away from the home.

I've often wondered what set of rare conditions are required to get Ball Lightening to form, when there are thousand's of "regular" lightening strikes daily around the world but very few or no events of ball lightening reported per year. They appear to be two separate phenomena, and there have been reports of ball lightening spontaneously forming during thunderstorm conditions, but NOT directly linked to a nearby lightening strike (although the nearby strike is apparently more common).

Dr. Kiril Chukanov claims from his observations that ball lightening has very strange Quantum capabilities; that it can "transport" instantly across small distances without affecting anything in between the two points, and that a "false image" of it can sometimes be seen several feet away; in his case, outside of the completely opaque pressure chamber where he creates and sustains it. He told me that to obtain some of these effects he suddenly dumped mega- volts/joules stored in banks of huge caps into water.

[Joit]

Nice Video,
so in the Case of a Storm the Energy has no prefered Direction,
not from Ground into Clouds or opposite where it does go to.
What i find interresting at some Records,
is that it seems like, there is a Top with a huge Amount of Energy in,
what do move to a Direction, and it leaves a Track of glowing.

[Farmhand]

Ball Lightning

I think I seen a ball of lightning a long time ago. I was watching a very severe electrical storm from a window of my old house overlooking the street, lightning bolts were hitting quite regularly around the area I could see, then one bolt hit the power pole right outside my house about 30 feet away, after I lept backwards and bounced off a wall I was back at the window to see a ball of light sliding down the curve of the power wires towards the next pole when it got to the bottom of the curve it dropped right onto a car, the car coughed and spluttered a bit while the ball was on it, the ball then slid off the car and when it hit the ground it disapeared, the car sped off with no obvious problems. I think it was a ball of plasma though I don't really know, it was 15 years ago memory a bit sketchy but I think it was blue/white about two to three feet diameter.

Wasn't till about a minute later I realised the window I was looking from had the power wire coming from the power pole right above it, I was lucky it didn't come my way I think, it scared the hell outa me.

Needles to say now when I watch lighning storms I make sure I am away from the supply line. Where I live now is on top of a big hill in the mountains, the lighning hits trees up here all the time sometimes it makes them explode.

Cheers

[rickoff]

Ball Lightening is a much more interesting phenomena imo, we have hundreds of reports through the years (including my own Grandparents), where Ball Lightening will float around near the ground for several seconds during a thunderstorm, or actually travel around inside a house, as happened with "Gramps and Grans", where a ball about a foot in diameter was seen coming out from behind a big old TV set (this was sometime in the 1950's), going right through the living room wall and floating down a hallway, producing bright light ...

I have never seen ball lightning, but my mom (who was born in 1915) said that it was a fairly common occurrence during her teenage years here in Maine. She said that on one occasion the ball entered the upstairs of her family's home through an exterior wall and bounced around the room before exiting. My mom said that her sister (just a toddler then) was actually bumped into by the ball and knocked over, but that it apparently caused no actual harm to her, or to any other objects or surfaces in the room. Strange stuff, and a very interesting phenomenon.

Rick

[sigzidfit]

Cool video.

I saw ball lightning up close. I was taking shelter under a cliff from an intense lightning storm. It appeared as if the lightning was a fluid and the ball was a bit of that fluid splashing off the rocks. I saw a bright glowing ball of it beginning about soccer ball size and spinning across a sleeping bag on the ground. It dissipated almost instantly and did not burn anything.

That entire storm experience was crap in your pants terrifying.

PJ