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Re: Beading caught on film.

Original poster: "Bob (R.A.) Jones" <a1accounting@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

----- Original Message ----- From: "Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 6:25 PM
Subject: Re: Beading caught on film.


Original poster: <dgoodfellow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I did see this once by eye in a natural lightning strike. I was traveling north in stop and go traffic, in west central Florida, an area that has particulary robust lightning. I had the window down on the car, and I was watching an approaching storm head. There came a bolt close enough to hear the arc as it connected with the ground, so I quickly turned my head to the left, to see the arc. It was one of those moments that I caught just right, because as I watched the bolt decay, it didn't just "shut off" as they often seem to, rather, it became segmented like a string of sausages, or a dashed vertical line. The links shrunk into smaller and smaller segments, until finally I saw what could be best compared to a string of pearls. The ball segment lasted only a split second, then they all vanished. I was probably only able to see this because of it's near proximity and it was in the mid afternoon, so there was not a severe difference in contrast between the daytime sky and the arc of lightning.
Not quite Tesla coil related, but I thought I would share this experience with you since the one frame of the film reminded my of that experience. It was quite amazing how the solid line became so perfectly like this ---------- to ............
I have seen irregular beading too. On one occasion the strike occurred behind me. I turned to see.
the arc was already decaying. It left several bright spots or what looked like glowing balls.
It was probably over in less than a second.
I was observing from a hill looking across to the storm. So I was able to see the remnants of the arc well and
I had not been blinded by the initial arc. I considered the possibility that the balls where vaporized birds but dismissed that.
It may be that I was viewing a section of arc end on so that it appeared bright. But it did not look like that as the balls appeared to decay with a different time constant.

Its interesting to note that recent investigators suggest that the forward and return strokes in a strike is a slow non linear EM wave reflected at the ground. Could the apparently irregular decay reflect a nonlinear event ? Just speculation

Possibly a related much smaller scale phenomena is observed in small sparks that have sections much brighter than the rest even in the middle of the spark. This effect may be due to dust.


Robert (R. A.) Jones
A1 Accounting, Inc., Fl
407 649 6400