Welcome Home...THANK YOU FOR BEING A PART OF OUR COMMUNITY

I downloaded my game cameras today. I got these pictures. This one is just to set the stage.  In it there is just a deer feeding.  Notice there is a tree barely visible a little to the left of the center of the picture just out of the light from the camera.  If you know it is there you can see it.

In this picture five seconds after the first one, another deer and a glowing orb appear.  The first deer appears to be looking at the orb and the light from the orb is making the tree more visible.

In the next picture the orb has moved and is almost in front of the tree and the tree is even more illuminated.

In this picture the orb has move again and the tree is barely visible again.

In this picture the orb is gone and the deer are both back to feeding

I am including this picture to show the area in the day and to show that there really is a tree there.

The first five pictures are in sequence and were five seconds apart.  So the time between the first picture with the orb and the last with the orb was ten seconds.  The time between first and fifth picture is 20 seconds.

I believe the orb is ball lightning.  I copied this from Wikipedia.

"Ball lightning is an unexplained atmospheric electrical phenomenon. The term refers to reports of luminous, spherical objects which vary in diameter from pea-sized to several meters. It is usually associated with thunderstorms, but lasts considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt."

What do you think it is?

Views: 176

Replies to This Discussion

I think you may be right!  The orb appears to float, it changes directions and does not last long.  VERY COOL!!!

Well that was neat. Strange thing happen.

Ball lightning is very quick tho..would have never lasted 5 secs. the light might not exist but only in the camera itself. the other  deer doesnt seem to notice it at all.

Jeff

From what I have been able to glean from researching ball lightning since getting the pictures, the duration of ball lightning can be fairly long.  This also from Wikipedia.  "The lifetime of each event is from 1 second to over a minute with the brightness remaining fairly constant during that time."  Another site I found stated that the duration was usually about one second but could be much longer.

When the camera is tripped at night, it has infrared emitters to illuminate the area.  These emitters glow.  In two of the pictures one of the deer is looking directly at the camera watching the glow.  The other deer completely ignores the glow of the emitters.  So the deer ignoring the orb doesn't surprise me.  In my experience I have found deer to be surprisingly tolerant of light at night.  I used to have flash type game cameras.  These would produce a bright flash of light each time they took a picture.  One of my cameras once took 15 pictures of a nice eight point buck.  The camera produced a bright flash 15 times at that deer.  It didn't bother it.  Maybe it is because deer believe it is just lightning.

And that orb definitely exists.  The light from it illuminates that tree near the center of the picture.

jeff said:

Ball lightning is very quick tho..would have never lasted 5 secs. the light might not exist but only in the camera itself. the other  deer doesnt seem to notice it at all.

this is interesting, for sure..living in Florida for 30+ yrs I have seen a lot of lightning, and many different types of lightning. Ball lightning being the fewest. but my real good friend had a ball lightning come thru her open sliding glass doors and bounce around her living room {very fast} and light her curtains on fire. My understanding, as with all lightning tho, is, lightning is looking for ground.. this usually happens very quickly, unless it is contained in a non-conductive container such as glass. Also, when lightning {any type of lightning} is that close to you... they would have felt it . more than likely thru their feet, but also thru their skin..  these are my opinions of course.. and I guess where that second deer doesnt seem to be startled at all, kind of throws me on the ball lightning theory. I do not have any other theories as to what it is, except for camera lens refraction of some sort or some other phenom..  great pics tho !! 

That is quite interesting Charles. I believe you are correct. Thank you for sharing it with us. It's not something we will all have a chance to witness. 

One of my jobs as an engineer with TVA was advising how to protect various facilities from lightning.  In doing that I did quite a bit of research on regular lightning.  What lightning is actually doing is equalizing charges.  A lightning stroke can be within a cloud, from cloud to cloud, from cloud to ground, or from ground to cloud.  A simple explanation of a complex phenomenon is it that a lightning bolt is a static electrical discharge between an area of excess negative charges and an area of excess positive charges.

Ball lightning is a different story.  Despite thousands of observed cases of ball lightning, until relatively recently the scientific community did not believe that it actually existed.  There are many different theories trying to explain ball lightning but so far none has definitively done so.  One is that it is a plasma.  Another that seems far out to me is that it is a mini black hole!

RSS

White River Knives

Visit Lee' s Cutlery

KNIFE AUCTIONS

KNIFE MAGAZINE!!!

tsaknives.com

JSR Sports!

Click to visit

© 2024   Created by Jan Carter.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service