Blue Jet

aliengrove · 2011-09-18T10:33:26+0100

The other night I was very lucky to get this shot from the aircraft over the Bay of Bengal. It is (I am nearly 100% certain; I am awaiting confirmation from Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who is a cloud expert) a Blue Jet, a very poorly understood phenomenon which is an electrical discharge in a thunderstorm that is emitted vertically upwards, and is straight. It lasted a bit longer than a normal lightning discharge, and travelled vertically upwards. They haven't been photographed very often, and I believe from researching them on the net that this is the first time one has been photographed in a cloud rather than erupting from the dome at the top of the cloud. In 30 years of flying I have never seen one of these before, so I feel exceptionally lucky to have got it on camera! I had set the WB prior to this shot using moonlight on the clouds, so it is an accurate representation of what we saw. No PP apart from a bit of noise reduction and minor sharpening. Taken with my Pentax K5 and Sigma Super-Wide II, 6 secs handheld at f2.8, ISO 200. If anyone is intested in reading more about this phenomenon, here's a

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snappychappy snappychappy

2545 posts
18 years
Wakefield

Posted 18/09/2011 - 17:36 Link

A couple of cracking images there, well taken.

My piccies.

Northgrain Northgrain

1057 posts
15 years
Glossop,
UK

Posted 18/09/2011 - 19:58 Link

Just astonishing. The blue jet phenomenon is fascinating - thanks for posting the link to the article - and your image a quite incredible capture. Definitely worth contacting the relevant experts.

Tim

Some of my vaguely better stuff

aliengrove aliengrove

2523 posts
16 years
Here,
there,
everywhere

Posted 18/09/2011 - 20:04 Link

Thanks for the comments! I don't expect I will ever photograph one of these again, so I was pretty pleased with it!

[

ChrisA wrote:

Terrific. Is there any more detail available in the clouds in the lower half? It would be nice to see just a little more of them, I think.

The six second exposure means anything not lit by the flash tends to be blurred, so there's not much point in trying to extract more detail from the foreground. Plus it introduces a lot of noise.

Flurble

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