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Answers about:  

_   Lightning
_ Clouds

Top 10 questions  

1

 Cause of  lightning

2

 Where lightning hits

3

 Hurricane spin

4

 How hot is lightning

5

 Jupiter's surface

6

 How rainbows form

7

 Ball lightning

8

 Hurricane energy

9

 Lightning hits a tornado
10  Orange night skies

Current Column:  A saintly light

st elmo's fire

Why would a lightning-struck tree glow after being hit? It is not on fire and does not give off heat, but glows. 

It was a dark and stormy night.  Chris emails he was walking in the woods  "a little after a thunderstorm" when he noticed the tree.  The tree, shattered by an earlier lightning stroke, stabbed the night like a broken pike.  An eerie glow extended ... Click to continue

A skater experiences the same thing, when suddenly a skate hits a rough spot and that skate slows. The skater turns toward the slower skate.

Light bends in a similar way both when it enters and leaves the raindrop.  See Figure 2.

Figure 2.  Light enters a raindrop (the circle), bends different amounts, and displays colors (red and violet illustrated).  Sketch from Beverly T. Lynds' About Rainbows.

Some colors slow more than others and therefore bend more. Violet light, for example, travels slower than red. That separates the violet from red light.

The red light emerges at a 42-degree angle to the original white ray. The violet reappears at only 40 degrees. The raindrop has separated the white light into colors and then re-directed the colored light back towards you. That's why you see the rainbow.

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