Celestial Fireworks

[lenscap]

The weather forecast was poor when I looked out of the window at about 10:15pm BST, Tuesday hoping for a chance to see a few Perseids. Instead I  saw repeated, bright flashes of light. I assumed a neighbour's floodlight was on the blink, but it was lightning.

For the next 40 minutes I stood outside enjoying the best display of (mostly) sheet lightning that I have ever seen in the UK. Every few seconds there were  multiple flashes from random directions covering all points of the compass, illuminating some cloud layers & backlighting others. It was completely silent; no thunder so  a little bit spooky,  like the opening scene from some dystopian sci-fi movie. There was no wind so the storm hardly moved at all.

After a while 2 banks of cloud to  my SW and NW started to produce brilliant forked lightning flashes; first one, then the other, like a choreographed firework display. Still silent so they must have been many miles distant although they seemed quite close. All the forks seemed to be within clouds, I saw no ground strikes. This perfectly matched the ancient idea of angry gods  hurling lightning bolts  across the heavens at each other.

At 11pm I heard the first rattle of thunder, and rain drove me indoors but the lightning continued for at least another hour. Amazing!

But what of the meteors?  Well for most of the time there was 100% cloud cover, but from 10:20 to 10:30pm there was a 15 degree hole near the zenith and at about 10;25 a beautiful yellow Perseid fireball zoomed past Vega, heading South-West, as if fleeing from the storm.

Fan-Tastic!

 

 

 

[Kyle Allen]

Nice report. 🙂

I saw an amazing storm last night too - being just south of you in Worcester it may have been the same one. I've never seen anything like it before. There were continuous flashes every few seconds that lit up the whole sky but no sound of thunder. I set up my camera in my back garden to take some photos. This one came out the best. I believe I can see a fork of lightning going horizontally across if I zoom in. 

I didn't see any Perseids last night (not suprising given my attention was focused on the storm) but the other night I was out I saw a couple of bright meteors that were going in the right direction from the radiant.