Lightning

In typical British fashion, the weather didn't know what it wanted to do the other day, so it decided to give us lots of different weather. This included a short thunderstorm which came from the cumulonimbus clouds that had been building up. With the lightning occurring very quickly after the thunderclap, I decided that it was close enough to get some photos - but how? I thought that as I'd be wasting my time trying to photograph the lightning - I'm not that quick - I'd film it instead. I then used an application to change the captured film frames into photographs. The results can be seen below:

Initially I was quite disappointed with what I'd captured. That was until I noticed that the lightning strike comes down the middle of the photograph - right in front of the house across the road!

It's interesting to note that immediately after the lightning the sky goes back to its pre-lightning brightness, but then becomes darker for a frame, before going back to normal until the next lightning strike. A typical thunderstorm can have around 1000 lightning strikes in an hour with each lasting 0.2 seconds. The air around a lightning strike can reach around 30,000C and discharge 1.5 million volts.

It's commonly said that lightning doesn't strike twice. This isn't so, in this clip from YouTube below, the Empire State Building is hit repeatedly: