This habit of yours, Amm0, of putting up pictures without any context is frustrating. Here's the context for the latest slow motion video of lightning --- Lightning Reveals Its Power in Slow Motion | This Day In Tech | Wired.com Since the lightning we see is actually just the superheated air, not the electricity itself, I wonder how many of the lingering lightning images are air so hot it takes awhile to cool down, or if the current flow is continuous at waning amperage. Also interesting is that the paths for several separate strokes are very closely identical; whatever "least resistance" medium the electrons follow doesn't change appreciably over as coarse a fragment of time as some hundredths of a second.
Lightning is weird. It can kill you, or it can leave you merely stunned. It can strike the ground as far away as ten (IIRC) miles from the cloud that produced it. It does strike the same place twice, or thousands of times, especially if it's the highest place around. It can travel through the ground a considerable distance from where it struck, and kill you by traveling up one leg and down the other if you are facing sideways to the point of impact. Back when there were fire watch towers (before satellites took over the bulk of that job) there were fire watch rangers who had been struck multiple times. It's an experience I hope to avoid.
This video was shown at a corporate Electrical Power Distribution seminar that I attended recently during a presentation on Arc Flash safety. It was shown during a break session and was meant more for the visual "wow" factor than for factual information. I do not know for sure whether the video is real or not but it sure would be very difficult to simulate those lightning strikes, especially the burn marks on the ground.
