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Lightning Research
Mike writes: "There was a great topic covered on tonight's episode of ABC's NightLine. They discussed lightning and how a group of researchers at the University of Florida have been able to develop rockets that "pull down" lightning and allow them to gather data to help find out more about it. They can capture lightning bolts with relative ease and film the bolts with high-speed cameras, revealing that what appeared as a single flash to the naked eye was often times three or four bolts in extremely rapid succession. While the article doesn't go into the detail that was covered on TV, you do get a video clip and nice overview. And photos and additional details are available at the University of Florida's Lightning Research Lab web site."
A lightning discharge is perhaps 500,000,000 volts at 10,000 amps.
Interesting references:
Great Lightning Photos -- West Virginia Lightning
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Lightning
Human Voltage -- What happens when people and lightning converge
Lightning Concepts
Bush's education improvements were
Probably most of everyone's recollections of seeing this a few years ago has to do with a show on it on TLC or Discovery. That show was documenting some of the research that is done at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico.
Every Summer, a bunch of teachers and students make the trip up South Baldy mountain to the Langmuir Lab in the hopes of triggering lightning.
It's not as easy as it might sound to trigger lightning. In fact, the Summer my roommate was up there (1992, I think), they weren't able to trigger any lightning.
Basically, someone would keep watch for promising storm clouds to come over the lab. Once the clouds got closer, they would start checking an electric field mill, a device used to measure the strength of the storm-induced fields. When the field was sufficiently high, a person sitting in what was essentially a steel pup tent would fire the rocket into the cloud, hoping to generate a strike along the metal cord that it carried with it.
Even though they didn't get any lightning that year, National Geographic sent up a photojournalist, who snapped some photo's of them. In late '92 or early '93, National GeoGraphic did have a small one or two page article on it at the back of the magazine, so they did get some recognition.
By the way, New Mexico Tech is also the same place where the NRAO is located (what is essentially the command post for the VLA radio telescope. It's the one seen in Contact.
They also do explosives research there, too. I've seen a show or two on TLC/Discovery that featured them. It's a neat school. Very underrated...and cheap, too!
--NMT, Class of '93