What Superman would see if he looked at a bolt of lightning.

[n2doc]

X-rays From Lightning Photographed

What Superman would see if he looked at a bolt of lightning.

Dec 14, 2010
http://www.insidescience.org/polopoly_fs/1.1833!/image/831303294.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_490/831303294.jpg
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, ISNS Contributor
Inside Science News Service

SAN FRANCISCO (ISNS) -- Using a custom-built camera the size of a refrigerator, Florida researchers have made the world’s first crude pictures of X-rays streaming from a stroke of lightning.

Seeing X-rays in relation to the lightning “leader,” the initial spark and the channel it makes through the air, should help researchers build better models of the twisty and still unexplained ways that lightning behaves.

The images are beyond blurry. They look like near-abstract blotches of white and green, better deciphered when displayed in a series with a rough sketch of the lightning tip superimposed.

“You can see the X-ray source descending,” Joseph Dwyer, a physics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, told a group of lightning specialists gathered Monday in San Francisco. “You start to see the air glow in X-rays.”

more
http://www.insidescience.org/research/x-rays-from-lightning-photographed

[ZombieHorde]

1. Well that curiosity is quenched. nt

[WingDinger]

2. Good for animating zombies,

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Sweet!

[struggle4progress]

4. It's the videoclip at the link and not the still photo in your OP, right?

I think the green/white stuff in the OP photo is the exhaust trail of a rocket used to trigger a lightning strike

[TheMadMonk]

5. Vaporisation/oxidation of the coper wire trailed by the rocket. /nt

[struggle4progress]

6. Um. Mebbe. But copper oxide is black.

[TheMadMonk]

7. The spectrum of burning copper is green. /nt

[struggle4progress]

8. I'm a lousy spectroscopist. Green from excited Cu with maybe later red-orange from excited CuO?

Don't know the expected reaction time or the duration of the exposure here