New ball lightning theory

I think more lightly ball lightning is mostly either of these:

1. Afterimages of a bright spot where lightning hits - such as a spot where metal or salts vaporize. Or an afterimage of a "bright spot" caused by a segment of lightning stroke being nearly parallel to your line of sight.
2. Drops of molten metal falling from where lightning hits. Molten metal does not wet most nonmetallic materials and sometimes fails to wet metallic objects, so drops of molten metal roll along things very easily. It is fairly common for drops of molten metal to only mildly and/or intermittently scorch things they roll over if they move fast enough. And they can be fairly large due to the high surface tension of many molten metals. In addition, sometimes aluminum can burn in a manner like that of magnesium, and is at least sometimes more easily ignited by an arc than by a flame.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I've heard of ball lightning being seen around the large bank of storage batterys that were used in WWII submarines and I have seen a moving picture on tv of an experiment to make ball lightning where they were trying to reproduce the battery effect and had an explosion of the battery gasses which was caught on high speed camera where they showed about 5 or 6 very small balls of what may be lightning about an inch or two in diameter bouncing across the floor. Does this tie in with what you are saying?

You sound like your involved in some heavy physics. A number of years ago, I read some similar theories. About 15 years ago, I had the experience of seening ball lightning. It was an interesting thing to see.

Jerry G. =======

Cool! what did it look like/lifetime/etc?

re. the post about submarines. It would certainly make sense, the smaller balls might be a lower energy version produced by spinning metal plasma blobs held together by electrostatics, instead of full-blown pm=lasma toroid clusters.

Regards,

-A

They were small and fast moving and lasted less than a second. Since the pictures were taken with a high speed camera it is hard to say exactly without knowing the frame speed of the camera. The actual run time of the images was about 3 or 4 seconds and the balls were deflected off the concrete floor at about a 10 or 15 degree angle and were traveling at a high speed. The distance that was observed in the video that they traveled was maybe 20 or 30 feet before passing out of camera view. One ball in particular (the largest one) bounced only once and about 15 feet from the camera and when it got out of view it was maybe 3 feet off the ground. With such a limited amount of information it is even possible that what was photographed was some burning "shrapnel". I can't say for sure but in the program that it was shown on they presented it as ball lightning. Hope this helps.

I was about 120 miles north of Montreal. It was during the summer, right after a heavy thunder shower. I stopped at a dining place to have some lunch. The area had a very strong smell of ozone, probably because of the heavy thunder showers.

I happened to look up and saw a sort of glowing circle of light. It was not very bright. It appeared to be like a transparent reddish blue ball. There appeared to also maybe have some traces of some yellow and green in it. The colour seemed to vary a little as if it was unstable. I would think that most of the colour that I saw was from reflections or just the ambient light in the area. This ball lasted about maybe 20 to 30 seconds if that long at all. It seemed to float towards some power lines near to a telephone poll. At that point it simply faded or vanished.

I know of someone else who also has seen ball lightning. He was over in Europe when he saw this.

I know of a story that someone had one come in to his house through an opened window. It floated around in his kitchen for about 30 seconds, and then disappears with a sort of snapping noise.

Was these some type of electrical build-up from charges that were in the air? Each time these occurred, it was right after severe thunder showers.

--

Jerry G.
=====

 wrote in message
news:1112378183.407901.9100@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>
> Jerry G. wrote:
> > You sound like your involved in some heavy physics. A number of years
> > ago, I read some similar theories.  About 15 years ago, I had the
> > experience of seening ball lightning. It was an interesting thing to
> > see.
>
> Cool! what did it look like/lifetime/etc?
>
> re. the post about submarines. It would certainly make sense, the
> smaller balls might be a lower energy version produced by spinning
> metal plasma blobs held together by electrostatics, instead of
> full-blown pm=lasma toroid clusters.
>
> Regards,
> -A
>
>
> >
> > Jerry G.
> > =======
>

When I was in the Air Force, one of my technicians made ball lightning accidentally.

We had these massive power supplies - called Invertrons if I remember correctly. Can't really remember what they did, but they had 3 phase input &

3 phase output, and each phase had 40 high power transistors on a massive heatsink. I think it created very clean 3 phase power.

Anyway, one of the techs was replacing a transistor - they died reasonably regularly. When putting it back in the 19" rack he wired the input to the output & vice-versa.

At turn-on, a ball of lightning about the size of a tennis ball came straight out of the front panel & floated around in the air a little for about 5 to 10 seconds, in front of about 5 technicians including some of the bosses. Quite impressive.

The mistake also blew out all 120 power transistors which took quite a rebuild! :-)

Dave

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