K3's Astronomy - Storm on Earth
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have set in place, what is Man that You are mindful of him?" -- Psalm 8:3,4
Professional astronomers research the large storms on Jupiter and Saturn. However these stormes are out of range of my telescope.
But it is possible to investigate storms on Earth. Common video camcorder can reveal the beauty of the lightnings.

The next video was taken by SONY Video8 camcorder in 29.5.2000, 1:20. Video was digitized with Matrox G400-TV card at full PAL resolution (704x576 pixels). Because commercial camcorders use interlaced scanning, each frame of captured video frame consists of two so-called fields (one field is composed by even scan lines, the second is composed by odd lines). After processing each frame and selecting odd and even lines, it is possible to obtain 50 frames per second (the vertical resolution is reduced to a half value, of course). It means that each frame shows the moment of 20ms. It is enough for watching the development and decay of lightning.

Storm 29.5.2000, 1:20
SONY Video8 camcorder

Video sequence was created from A, B fields of each frame. The sequence has 25 fps, but original sequence had 50 fields per second. That means that the sequence is 2x slower than the real situation. The frames are result of processing and cutting the video (frames between lightnings were cut to reduce the AVI file size. Frame size of the AVI was reduced to 240x180 pixels.

The file with higher resolution (320x240) pixels is here.

For those, who want to watch the lightnings more detaily, here is a sequence of 92 frames in JPG format. You can use ACDSee or similar image viewer for browsing through the frames.

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Last Update: 1.6.2001