This is What Lightning Looks Like at 7,000 Frames Per Second

Lightning strikes are usually so brief that their tiny details aren’t noticed by the human eye. Capture lightning at 7,000 frames per second, however, and all kinds of crazy details emerge. That’s what you’ll see in the 45-second video above.

It was captured by Professor Ningyu Liu of the Florida Institute of Technology’s Geospace Physics Laboratory. Liu used a special camera to shoot a storm that occurred on May 20th over Melbourne, Florida. The playback speed is the equivalent of 700 frames per second, so every 10 seconds in the video shows about 1 second in real time.

Here’s a GIF of one of those seconds:

Back in 2013, we also shared what lightning looks like at a staggering 11,000 frames per second.