Start of Lightning Bolt Caught on Camera

From the nature article, it seems this was the first video of natural bidirectional lightning, not triggered by rockets or aircraft: "In contrast to studies of rocket-triggered lightning and lightning initiated by aircraft, which found delays of 3–6 ms between the onset of negative and positive leader branches, this natural event exhibited a delay of less than 90 μs (i.e. one video image)."

This was a negative polarity lightning strike. the most common type. Less than 5% of lightning is positive polarity but they can carry ten times the charge and exceed a billion volts of potential.

When you read about people surviving lightning strikes it's almost certainly a negative polarity strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Positive_and_negativ...

Re: Start of Lightning Bolt Caught on Camera

#8

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 2:28 PM UTC

timtadh wrote: post #3

Here is the Nature article that this video goes with. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15180 .

That's obviously more substantive, and HN prefers original sources, but unfortunately it doesn't include a link to the video, so I guess we'll leave the URL as is.

Re: Start of Lightning Bolt Caught on Camera

#9

Post by timtadh » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #8

timtadh wrote: post #3

Here is the Nature article that this video goes with. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15180 .

That's obviously more substantive, and HN prefers original sources, but unfortunately it doesn't include a link to the video, so I guess we'll leave the URL as is.

It is unfortunately hidden at the bottom as .mov in the supplementary information section: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15180#supplementary-infor... .

Re: Start of Lightning Bolt Caught on Camera

#10

Post by webXL » Fri, Oct 23, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

11k fps. Wow. I will never get tired of watching this stuff.

That got me thinking, is there any theoretical limit to the number of frames that can be captured in one second?