This video is a slideshow of a series of photos I took with my drone as a storm approached Brisbane, with a strange phenomenon that I'm unfamiliar with. You can see a horizontal bolt of lightning s...

This video is a slideshow of a series of photos I took with my drone as a storm approached Brisbane, with a strange phenomenon that I’m unfamiliar with.

You can see a horizontal bolt of lightning slowly crawling its way across the sky from left to right. What’s interesting is that each frame of the slide is an 8 second still, meaning that the bolt was visible in the sky for over a minute!

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    2·
    12 days ago

    If the exposure time on each of those stills is long enough, that could easily be ball lightning moving enough to cause a streak on each frame.

    Ball lightning is rare, but has been observed to wander around slowly, occasionally with an explosive end. This doesn’t go on long enough to see anything like that, though.

    Either that or it’s something else bright and point-like doing the same thing, caught in the wind maybe.

    • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      The video is just a slide show of 8 photos, each photo with an 8 second exposure, so the actual motion was over 1 minute. I wasn’t aware of it when I was actually doing the captures though, so I caught it “mid strike”. The stills I took before and after those 8 frames were pointed at a different section of the sky, so I don’t know if it ended with a big discharge

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      12 days ago

      While it’s possible that there are multiple phenomena behind things grouped up as ball lighting, there was a theory that it was basically the result of a lightning strike hitting the ground, vaporizing certain substances, and then the cloud of resulting gas rising and reacting momentarily while in the air.

      A couple years back, there was some Chinese group studying lightning — not ball lightning — with some high-speed cameras and a spectrometer, and they got lucky and had one show up in their footage. The spectrogram showed that it was consistent with the “vaporized stuff from a strike on the ground” theory.

      kagis

      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-lightning-probed-for-the-first-time/

      Natural ball lightning probed for the first time

      The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

      Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there’s also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet’s oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

      The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

      But I don’t think that what the footage shows is likely a cloud of gas reacting. It didn’t look like a bolt, and in the footage I saw, was just slowly rising. And it didn’t last very long, either.