Topic: Storms: Central Eastern NSW 4th-6th March 2007

[David C]

Beautiful shots Jeff. Ball lightning?.......well cant imagine it would be sprites etc given your proximity to the storm.

[Brad Hannon]

I could have also caught a very rare electrical phenomenon in one of my pics.

We have a very rare electrical phenomenon down here too - it's just called lightning!    But seriously, I hope it is ball lightning you captured Jeff.  Im pretty sure Nick Moir will be interested having heard his recollection of an encounter with ball lightning when he was young.

[Jeff Brislane]

Brad,

You cracked me up with that comment about the rarity of lightning down there! I beleive i've captured not ball lightning but a plasma filiment emanating from the ground about 5 to 10 meters in front of my car. It occured with a cg that struck within 100 meters of my car on the left hand side and out of the frame, however i caught branches from the cg in the picture. The lightning was so close to my car that it's actually lit up the raindrops in the photo like a giant flash bulb!

I am however open to interpretation regarding it being a plasma filament or not. I was shooting through my front windscreen at the time. I know about the reflection effect with camcorders but I don't beleive it happens with normal cameras but you never know.

Jeff.

[Jeff Brislane]

Here is the image. First the full size image, then just the left hand side cropped and lastly the suspect area zoomed in. Now I know that pretty much nobody will be able to say for sure what it is but note that if it was a reflection, it seems to stop abruptly at it's brightest point before the edge of the frame and the structure of the lightning that is visable doesn't resmble the suspect area in the slightest.







Jeff.

[Jimmy Deguara]

Any discussion about the feature should take place here:

http://www.australiasevereweather.com/forum/index.php?topic=400.msg2954

Only other observations and reports of these "Central Eastern NSW 4th-6th March 2007" should continue here.

Thanks,

Jimmy Deguara