This is incredible. I'd like to know what the physical process is here in terms of the colors and current paths. Is the red light a product of hydrogen gas disassociated from water vapor? Spectral phenomena of glow discharge?
> My first time-lapse. Thanks to some instruction and tips from @Astro_Ayers, I caught my first aurora. After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing. Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked. Thanks, Vapor!
> These are Star Trails taken from my previous mission to the ISS, Expedition 30, in 2012. I call it "Lightning Bugs."... In the photo, stars make arcing trails in deep space, while a huge thunderstorm pounds Earth below as seen from the time history of lightning flashes.
Oh yes, let's everyone stop posting links to twitter because someone disagrees with the political views of the owner. So much for having some tolerance right?
I've wished people stopped posting links to twitter the moment twitter started requiring people to create/log into an account in order to view anything. I think the political concerns are every bit as valid as concerns over accessibility and privacy, but ultimately there are a lot of good reasons to avoid linking to twitter.
Triggered much? I’m expressing my free speech by refusing to use his neo nazi website and encouraging others to avoid it too. Why do I have to tolerate him?
Please don't partake in virtue signalling. It makes you feel like you're making a difference, allows you to signal to your tribe that you feel a certain way (gaining you virtue among them), but requires 0 actual effort.
I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.
This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.
The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.
I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
Reading through the comments and reviewing the video does indeed point to arcing power lines. Ive seen videos of fast moving arcs across medium voltage lines that looked like a horizontal jacobs ladder. The lines over current protection equipment might not instantly trip as the current might be limited by enough impedance in the equipment. Disappointing reveal.
Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.
I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.
Sprites get their characteristic red color from excitation of nitrogen in
the low pressure environment of the upper mesosphere. At such low
pressures quenching by atomic oxygen is much faster than that of
nitrogen, allowing for nitrogen emissions to dominate despite no
difference in composition. As the atmospheric pressure increases in the
lower atmosphere, the red emissions are quenched and blue emissions from
atmospheric nitrogen excitation dominate. . .
The trouble with fancy photography (which National Geographic is famous for) is it can make things look far more spectacular or "otherworldly" than real life. Apparently this lightning can't usually be seen by people, occur above the clouds, and in the blink of an eye. You could be looking right at it and not notice anything otherworldly. Well that's not impressive. You can also see otherworldly things just by watching water move up close or looking at space through a telescope, or using an instrument to visualize EM fields or whatever. I expect those things to be otherworldly because they are.
For that matter I think a large part of what makes anything “otherworldly” is beauty in things unfolding outside our normal experience of the world: I don’t see what distinguishes glorious NG photography from the other methods. It’s only natural to expect that from techniques that let us access phenomena that wouldn’t be perceptible in terms of ordinary human scale or sense of time
My cynicism of NG photography is that you can't go look at the thing yourself and see it the way they show. The pictures are effectively faked though fancy camera tricks. Yea it's fascinating to see beyond our usual senses, but it's also obvious that those things are going to be strange and otherworldly so it doesn't even need to be said. Truly amazing otherworldliness would be something you can (in principle) stand there and ogle with your own senses.
Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.
> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.
Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.
No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.
Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?
