Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jan Carter on March 12, 2016 at 20:07

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

Permalink Reply by Clint Thompson on March 13, 2016 at 8:39

Well that was neat. Strange thing happen.

Permalink Reply by jeff on March 13, 2016 at 9:52

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.

FeaturedPermalink Reply by Charles Sample on March 13, 2016 at 12:10

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.

Permalink Reply by jeff on March 13, 2016 at 12:56

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 !! 

FeaturedPermalink Reply by Jeremy B. Buchanan on March 14, 2016 at 11:23

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. 

FeaturedPermalink Reply by Charles Sample on March 14, 2016 at 19:41

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!