Lighting over Ballinroad, County Waterford, Ireland this afternoon. @deric_tv @AimsirTG4 @AAWeatherWatch @CarlowWeather @MetEireann @VisitWaterford @waterfdweather @weatherchannel @DonegalWeatherC @weatherchannel @severeweatherEU pic.twitter.com/HpJeqMmmaW
— Patrick Kenealy (@patrickkenealy) May 18, 2021
The fork?
This afternoon.
Any excuse.
The spectacular fruit of photographer and stormchaser Paul M.Smith’s ongoing mission to capture images of rare Red Sprite lightning.
Jellyfish, column, carrot-style – it’s all good.
Related: Sprites Rouges
Spent a good hour out in the storm in Waterford last night. Spliced all the good clips together and added music.
Pretty happy with the result even if it does seem like further proof that the world is ending. #LightningStorm #Thunderstorm@broadsheet_ie pic.twitter.com/SQJPJSjZ8v
— Elsie Ronan (@ElsieRonan) June 14, 2020
Saturday night.
WOWZA!
CBS affiliate WUSA SkyCam captured video of the Washington Monument being struck by lightning Friday morning in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/ETlcsDOSO5
— Local 12/WKRC-TV (@Local12) June 5, 2020
No, it’s an obelisk.
This morning.
The Washington Monument, Washington DC, USA.
Ejaculatory, in fairness.
Not really. What appears to be an electrical discharge from the Milky Way is actually a distant storm photographed from the Italian island of Sardinia last June. To wit:
The foreground rocks and shrubs are near the famous Capo Spartivento Lighthouse, and the camera is pointed south toward Algeria in Africa. In the distance, across the Mediterranean Sea, a thunderstorm is threatening, with several electric lightning strokes caught together during this 25-second wide-angle exposure. Much farther in the distance, strewn about the sky, are hundreds of stars in the neighbourhood of our Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. Farthest away, and slanting down from the upper left, are billions of stars that together compose the central band of our Milky Way.
(Image: Ivan Pedretti)
An evocative three and a half-minute sequence of lightning strikes and billowing storm clouds by Arizona-based storm-chaser and videographer Dustin Farrell.
Shot over two years and edited over 300 hours, it’s a sequel to this 2017 full-screener.
A spectacular two-image composite of lightning striking communication antennas near the top of Volcán de Agua (Volcano of Water) in Guatemala earlier this month.
Details of what causes lightning are still being researched, but it is known that inside some clouds, internal updrafts cause collisions between ice and snow that slowlyseparate charges between cloud tops and bottoms The rapid electrical discharges that are lightning soon result. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. On average, around the world, about 6,000 lightning bolts occur between clouds and the Earth every minute.
(Image: Sergio Montúfar (Pinceladas Nocturnas)
