You dont need a fancy camera to see lightning in slowmo, just get really high!

kcm117

@aphxtwn: That would require some luck, and be extremely badass if it works.

FredicvsMaximvs

Something's a little fishy. Right toward the end there are a couple of really quick flashes that happen all of out proportion to the slow-ocity of the rest of the vid.

mildretard

That ain't lightning, it's Missile Command 2008.

bobdobbs

wow, i'm not very nice.

kahri

@Optimus-Prime: After some fairly spastic play/pause action, I can say that it looks as if one of the little trailers from the first bolt makes contact with the ground, and then an enormous electrical charge from the Earth works its way back along that path up to the cloud.

But direction of travel with electricity can get confusing; in a battery (DC current) the electrons travel from - to +, although many people say the current travels from + to -.

FredicvsMaximvs

they could take 3 of these and make a 3d model of a lightning strike.

aphxtwn

@Optimus-Prime The second bolt or the main one that connects and gets brighter goes up from the ground. I don't remember why but my science teacher said so. Very hard to tell from watching because it is so quick although this video seems to capture it.

gregmick

It's like the sky is God's etch-a-sketch

GiggleGoose

@gloveofpower: sure here you go www.google.com

kahri

this explains while when you see lighting the whole cloud glows a split second before it hits the ground.

Lupison

I estimate that camera was shooting around 5,000 to 10,000 frames per second.

Jitty

The second starts from the ground, hit play/pause between 4-5 seconds until you freeze it just at the right moment.

BiZarRroBALlmeR

Wait, you guys don't see that every time lighting strikes?

FEAST

Reminds me of the Despair.com "Power" lithograph; "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it rocks absolutely, too."

[www.despair.com]

Beautimus. Someone needs to mix some sound in there.

Rotnmeat

Perfect title for this one giz, cuz oh yeah that noise is freaking SCIENCE man! Consider our minds blown, and could you please post a link to direct us all to where we can buy a camera that will do this? =)

gloveofpower

I call shennanagans. Looks touched up.

Harkonian

I can watch this over and over and over.....and...well you know.

Truly amazing.

RE-L

OMG HAWT!!!
That is wickedely(sp) AWESOME!!!!!!
I can haz moar?

Simpsons-Movie-ruled

AOIJESOIfj. Oh wow. That's cool.

goo2

That is the most incredible thing I have ever seen.

wired203

^ what he said.

MacAddict21

That is friggin' amazing... so a light bolt starts from top... searches down with tentacles... one seems to reach ground in some good spot (like Frucci's Casio) and that releases the electronz?

wow...

future-proof

Amazing. I have heard mixed opinions as to whether the large bolt (2nd in the video) comes down from the sky or up from the ground. Does anyone know the answer?

Optimus-Prime

That was incredible.

BurstAneurysm

Hooooooly crap. Part of me says "fake" but most of me says "awesome." The first OS that implements the reaching out lightning bolt as a loading bar wins my loyalty for life.

zimzombie

zomg that was cool!

Glavan27

wow....that last bolt stays constant for awhile. I wonder how long this was in reality.

MrBlahBlah

holy shit that was fucking coooool as hell.

nachobel

Crike! I want moooaaar! Its wicked how it creeps along at first, I'd like to see this with that lightning that snakes across the whole sky in a similar fashion.

Relldavis

thats sweet

tenio

wow that is amazing, how much are they?

wanago

I used my Ex-F1 to catch some lightning a few weeks ago. Didn't have the forehthought to try the video. . . But the 60 FPS full resolutions turned out pretty good.

For those of you interested, the web that you see at the begining of the film shows what are called "step leaders" and as future-proof sugested, discharge before the stricke and the first leader to find a ground source releases the charge. . .

VERY COOL!!!!

Brian Bunch

@kcm117: Hmm, still requires money, and how do you know you'll be in the right mind to give a damn about the slow-mo lightning? Might get distracted.

bbfreak

Too amazing! I quit!

itchytooth

Well lightning, and its subsequent restrikes along the same channel can last a couple hundred MS. Even 300fps would be sufficient to turn a multi-strike event like this (I count at least 7) into a fairly long clip. Cool, but you dont need stupid fast camera for a multi-strike event.

1roll20s

i'm officially feeling the wrath. of doom.

mariathephan

Forwarding this to a buddy of mine. He was struck by lightning in the early 90's. Lost his left eardrum, cooked his arm upon exiting his elbow, and tossed him a good distance.

After he sees this, he's going to flashback. I'm going to find him in curled up in a ball in the corner of a room, repeating, "Take me to my happy place... Take me to my happy place..."

Bweetza

I WANT THAT CAMERA!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!!!

alin0steglinski

@Jitty: I agree. Judging by how long the final bolt stays on the screen I'm thinking 10,000 fps or higher.

mor10

@wanago: about a thousand

jspec1594

@ara: Well, didn't die completely, but that's some serious burn-in.

ara

Seems like the sensor died after the large stroke? Must have been cranked to the max to get such exposure at those framerates, just the environment was just post processed in there.

ara

I'm trying to decide whats hotter. Lindsayjoy's picture or the video above!

--Scott

Scott

Just how fast would the camera have to be to capture the second, ground-to-sky, bolt in just as much detail/slowness as the first part with the "step leaders"??

It just seems to touch and then *BOOM*.

WiwiJumbo

"That"

SinAmos

@nachobel: The was hotter than hell. Sweet jesus oh my damnation is certain.

SinAmos

HOLY
FUCKING
FUCK!!!

Ariel_Wollinger

@FredicvsMaximvs: agreed, it can be confusing and the last time I heard the topic of "direction" of current travel was debated.

that aside, I LOVE how you can just watch it looking for a ground and then ZAP!!

Jiert

Wow... consider my mind blown.

Doctor Dentz

Nature always has the best special effects.

Kaiser-Machead's WALL-E fetish

Looks like the camera got burned in at the end there: the bold just wouldn't go away.

unspellable

Is there anything that doesnt look WAY cooler in slo mo, because this sure does.

Curves

ok. The first bolt it was creating ionized paths so it didn't travel that fast which means the camera could catch it and we saw it traveling down.

the reason the second bolt appears to travel "up" is because the ionized path was already made so it struck down at nearly the speed of light which means the camera couldn't possibly catch it traveling down.

as far as why it appears to glow up, that's probably some property of energy dissipation or something, but i assure you lightning strikes the earth and it comes from clouds, not the other way around.

jam3972

Ok someone get this in a little slower motion, then tape a whole storm, cut out the boring parts, tape someplace that looks nice, and Windows dreamscene here it comes. Think about doing some excell sheets with like 20 different lightining strikes going off randomly in slow motion on your desktop!

jakeyjohn1

If you look closely at the last two seconds, you can see an alien pod coming down through the bolt.

winexprt

@johnnyabnormal:
yes it does... it's that return stroke that does the damage.

AND THE KILLING!!!!! muhahahahaha

scarbrtj

That makes me want to get struck by lightning so BAD. Thanks Giz, when my heart and spinal column asplodes, I'll be thinking of you.

Human Bomb

AWESOME does not even BEGIN to describe how fuckin' cool that was. For once the guys at Gizmodo are right on the money. Pretty much everyone is going to want that camera now. Those that don't, well they don't count as being human so we can just off them and call it a day ;)

SgtBeavis

@Jiert: @FredicvsMaximvs:

You're saying lightning travels from the earth up to the clouds?

johnnyabnormal

I wish there was something in the foreground so that i could see what the true time was like.

hu_hu_cool

Gotta be a Phantom camera. At lower resolution it can shoot up to 1,000,000 fps. We use them all the time on commercial shoots.

Mr. Kite

@1roll20s: I don't know anything about weather events etc, but I saw a lightning storm yesterday with one bolt that stayed in the same position/config for about 5 seconds. It flickered on/off during that time - so I guess it fits with what you said about taking the same path.

Riquez

lightning can go up or down, remember that the earth is considered for static electricity purposes as an infinite well and and infinite sink. [en.wikipedia.org]

jkr2

[mind blown away...] That was amazing.

drigo02

As a storm chaser who is addicted to lightning, I don't think I'll be able to pull myself away from this video this evening...

gadjitfreek

@scarbrtj: So you're saying the first action is from the earth to the clouds and then the return path from the clouds to the earth is the only part we can see?

@jam3972: You're saying it starts in the clouds first and then hits the earth?

johnnyabnormal

There is a great vid and a multitude of information on lightning at howstuffworks.com
[science.howstuffworks.com]

Krowyn

So awesome :D

Mike918

Look up a lightning bruise picture and see how similar it looks to that root/tree lightning in the sky. Awesome.

Kaisum

Great vid! We need a real time version for comparison.

atomx

Am I the only one who watched this with a palm face-up in front of the screen, formed into a claw to call down the fury? Eh, probably not. Awesome clip!

Ragnaroknroll

since no one else has, I'm calling fake!

actually I have no idea, but everyone was strangely non-sarcastic...

I'd love some details, like how long it actually took for one

stwf

Yawn.....
who am I trying to kid... that's 'bad-ass'. Now if only I could put that video in slowww-mo.

castrol

Well... I'm impressed.

*leaving to check if anywhere in town sells this camera*

ttech10

WOW WOW.

Strider-No.9

I love how one of the little tendrils from the first strike seems to curl back around on itself.

justhesh

Holy crap that just blew my mind.

chrstphr

That is, hands down, one of the top 5 coolest videos I've ever seen.

Ever.

Stang70Fastback

scientific grade high speed digital cameras often go over two /million/ fps nowadays

TheDude06

Either way, COOL!!!

KarinDiscoGirl

@jam3972: I was under the impression, according to my science teachers at least, that lightning travels both ways, from the clouds to the ground and vice versa. Perhaps I'm wrong...wouldn't be the first time...

KarinDiscoGirl

Damn nature, you scary!

o0adam0o

BACKORDER?!?!?! DMNIT!!!

shenanigans61

Did anyone think that looked kinda like one of those artist's depictions of a multipolar neuron firing?

DisposableInterloper

Hm. ok upon further investigation I am quite possibly wrong, it could be going either way. sorry to state otherwise as fact.

but my point that it happens instantaneously and therefore we can't really be sure remains.

jam3972

PRON in slow-mo is f-ing hilarious, but this plain rules!!!!

Triplet66

Yes, that's exactly what I thought actually.

MirDreams

The lightning dribbling down from the sky reminds me of the Japanese dan-ball powder dust java game.

Pretty.

judacris

Umm yeah that vid was freaking cool as hell. Very cool to see the lightning strike in slow motion.

blackacidevil

Wow...

ten10

that is Heaven's version of fireworks! take that humans!!

Amiash is inquisitive

Wow! ('nuf said)

nuttykiwi

@FredicvsMaximvs: The "current" thing was discovered before people knew about electrons. They knew there was comething that went from one side to another. Called one side "+" and the other "-" (just because they had to name them) and conventioned that the "current" went from + to -.

Later, they found out about the electrons, and that they actually traveled from - to +.

Thus, the electrons and the current travel in opposite ways.

(i hope it's understandable with my bad english...)

Dynosaulo

@BurstAneurysm: I agree. It looks like the lighning moves outward until it finds the ground, and when it does, BAM!

Shanesan

This video was shot over the set of "How to survive a Japanese Game Show", zzzap, ha ha ha you lose!!!

lionelbob

@jam3972: "struck down at nearly the speed of light"
Lightning doesn't travel anywhere near the speed of light, 250,000 m/s is considerably less than 300,000 km/s, in fact it is three magnitudes less. [en.wikipedia.org]

jkr2

The first "bolt" keeps dividing itself because of the resistance of the air. It "tries" to find a good way that will lead it somewhere where it can "discharge".

What happens is that this "good way" it found remains as a good way for a little time, and ends up working as a cable, connecting the earth to the atmosphere. So the earth uses this cable to discharge itself, and it is a FAR bigger charge than the one from the atmosphere.

Well... it's something like that.

Dynosaulo

that is honestly something i have never seen before and i can almost assuredly say nobody i know has ever seen something like that before either. simply amazing

elislider

Truly bad ass video shot!

trailingedge

Superbly awesome (unless you're at the receiving end of the bolt)!

drcullex

Despite its confident appearance, a lightning flash develops in fits and starts. The path of a typical cloud-to-ground (CG) flash lowering negative charge to earth is carved by a series of stepped leaders, each moving a bundle of charge a distance on the order of a city block. Each step takes only 1 microsecond or so, but the pauses between steps are much longer--on the order of 50 microseconds. At each step, the bolt may shift direction toward a stronger electric field, thus creating its crooked appearance. As a CG flash approaches several regions of opposite charge on the ground, it often branches into several parts.

Just before it reaches ground, the step leader induces a huge electric potential (some 10 million volts), enough to bring up surges of positive charge from sharp objects or irregularities near the ground. Once the impulses meet--a few tens of meters above earth--the connection is established and the return stroke zips upward at a rate much faster than the stepped leader's descent. It is this return stroke that produces the visible flash as it heats surrounding air to 30,000 degrees C (54,000 degrees F), which in turn creates the shock wave we hear as thunder.

FireZingr

It's real.

Promise.

Watch the Discovery channel sometime people.

what's *amazing* is that we're able to see time-shifts the way we are. maybe everyone is blase about timelapse-shifting, but that's just as amazing. Watch a tomato plant crawl around on the ground following the sun for a day... it can move over a foot.

go science!

-j

hilobird

How many people started searching for the best place to buy this camera after watching this video? :)

manateemedia

Dang oh dang

chumleyex

i have to go to my sabershop and have my light saber do this... (hissing & air vent noise)

darthvader66

me thinks that this is a chroma key'ed movie of the lightning thing-a-ma-jiggy saucer that you plug into your home electric socket.. like this one [us.st12.yimg.com]

darthvader66

i feel the need to curse... awking foresome!!!!

keysereble

OPTIMUS PRIME, What happens is a "Trace Leader"which is very thin thread of ionized air will come up from the ground, this trace leader comes up from multiple sources simultaniously reaching for the area of sky and clouds that have an opisite electrical charge, these "Trace Leaders" may originate from anything on the ground but frequently start from taller ground objects, they travel from a few feet to a few hundred feet untill one of these "Trace Leaders" will connect with a similar thread of ionized air coming down from above, this complets a path to the ground and the positivly charged cloud, the cloud then discharges it's positivly charged potential to the negativily charged ground, "Trace Leaders" can be seen but rarly, they are very opaque and appear and disapper in an instant and are nothing more than a path of ionized air, there are a small handfull of photographs of them. Hope this answers your question.

Benf13

Simply one of the most incredible things I have EVER seen.

TurboFool

@Optimus-Prime:

As much as know, the small, wiggly, sneaking stuff is called streamers. They ionize the air and "open" the path between the cloud and the ground. Then, the lightning actually travels UP from the ground. That's the discharge.

tabaks

Great video, although I'm not entirely convinced it's not been doctored.

paulnptld

Awesome video.. What program did you use to animate that video or how did you make it that slow? Light is so fast that even at slow motion.. It was so fast..

charles
Money Making and Blogging Tips

cipals15

FUCKING AYE.

that just made my friday. can't wait to get home and show this video to my wife.

mother nature is the shit. that is all.

zanzibarlegend

@Dynosaulo:
pretty close actually. That first bolt ionizes the air, so when it reaches the ground there's a path of least resistance already formed and so a much larger change can flow through that path.

knyghtryda

give us a quicktime so we can scrub through it!

duuktoprock

@Benf13: I was shooting video off my little point and shoot on the backside of a storm a few weeks ago, Lightning was about 1-2 miles away, and it was fairly active, strike every 10 seconds or so. After 15 minues or so, I downloaded the videos to my computer. Finding the main lightning bolt I would go back and forth between frames, and on 2 occasions I caught a trace leader, they were faint and pink, and went into the air about 10- 20 feet and were jumping off the corner of an industrial trash bin on wet asphalt, talk about a great conductor. It appeared and disappeared in 1 frame, so 1/30th of a second or so is all it lasted. Really cool to finally catch what so few have.

rochdaker

I was shooting video of a storm that had just passed over and after reviewing on the computer I caught 2 instances of the Trace Leaders, they apear pink and very faint, and they were coming off of an industrial garbage bin, sitting on asphalt in a pool of water, what a great conductor. It leapt off the edge about 20 feet in the air, so in essence it DOES come from the ground up, and meets the in midair.

rochdaker

most of what we see as lightning is only the return stroke from ground to cloud. mostly we never see the cloud to ground stroke.

that's hella cool

krystar

Yeah I love how it is branching through the air to try to find the ground to discharge. Similar to how a ground wire works really. It eventually connects it's link and a flash of intense energy bursts through that path of least resistance.

addiktion

Oh snap. Dats off da hook!!!

Spawnomite

@jam3972: Nothing happens instantaneously. "Instantaneous" is a human abstraction, like a single point in space. Just because something happens too fast for the human eye to discern doesn't mean it doesn't have speed or direction.

Tonicboy

I think I peed a little. :O

CapitalC

The Wrath of TR2N.

kangaroo

Ok, I hate to be the one to mention the extreme, but......What about HAARP and weather manipulation. The ionized tendrils are due to a super charged atmosphere. Seems to me storms have become much more intense the last year or so, with louder thunder, and more extreme lightening.

For those that might be interested a good background on weather manipulation can be found in a video called Owning the Weather in 2025. And you might find it interesting to learn about HAARP, but be sure to read other sites beside their own official site.

OkieRebel

Everybody,

This is a super high speed camera used for lightning research by NASA. This video was shown to about 500 meteorologists at an AMS convention. It is actual video, the camera that captured the shot runs at 4,000 frames per second. The actual time on the stroke is about 1/10th of a second. The lightning researcher from NASA told us that at a standard 30 frames/second..... one second of video from that camera would last over 2 minutes. Thought someone may be curious.

PTPWX

High speed photography exposes the amazing physics behind lighting. But I can't explain it. Apparently, the upper atmosphere is rich in positive ions and the Earth is rich in loose electrons. The first explosion might be the formation of a plasma ball that cools suddenly and precipitates towards Earth. One of the particles opens a conduit for electrons to surge from the Earth to the upper atmosphere. But why does the matter of the plasma fall down if it's super heated?

torontoGemini

The video confirms that lightning is something which flows from the clouds down to the Earth. It is as if the clouds are behaving like large gravitational reservoirs/capacitors. Inflowing aether that is the cause of gravity builds up and then it bursts out under pressure. The forks of lightning are like concentrated streams of gravity. I doubt if any charged particles flow along with lightning. See,

[www.wbabin.net]

Dayum So amazing !!!!

See those first forked off paths in nearly a hundred different directions,,, each single path is another moth being zapped.

I'd like to know the entire duration of thise strike.

The electric universe, see it here!

I wish the video extended to the conclusion of the strike. I'd like to see how the discharge resolved--ground-upward or sky-downward, as well as any residual charges. Also would be cool to hear pitch-corrected sound of the thunder, matched in real time to the lightning video.