Isn’t that the green flash taht can been seen when a soul comes back to life?
(as in pirates of the caribbean)

An interesting note about Brocken spectres: the order of the colors is different from in a rainbow. They’re reversed, VBGYOR, inner edge to outer.

The southern lights, just beautiful, absolutley beautiful

I really don’t know why you’ve left out a total eclipse of the sun. The most stunning natural phenomenon I’ve ever whitnessed.

I just wanted to tell you on the ball of lightening, there is at least three in that clip. The first one is about ten seconds in, but he doesnt focus in on it like the other two.

What about lunar eclipse?

I’ve heard green flashes refered to by my grandfather as “Sun Dogs”. I’ve seen three of them, one on the end of a humid hot day in an Upstate New York and two when I was in the navy (one in the carribean and one in the Indian ocean.
St. Elmo’s Fire seems to be missing from the list. It’s a green glow that surrounds the top points of ships masts and yardarms. The first time you see it, it’s scarey if you don’t know what it is. It’s mentioned in the novel Moby Dick.
As to b b’s comment: natural phenmenon in the case mentioned in the article above is classified as the fourth element plasma. The Moon is not plasma though the Sun is, but it’s not a phenomenon.

Wow David, you must have, like, no life. Too many movies much!

there is a gravity hill/electric brae about 10 to 15 minutes south of canandaigua, new york. in the area it is known as spook hill, and one of the local schools use it every year for the track teams first long run.

I saw a broken spetre once. I was on a plane and I saw a perfectly circular double rainbow on the clouds uderneath, it was really amazing !

I live in San Antonio and we have a gravity hill and the legend is that a school bus of kids got hit and killed sometime back in the 20’s and they haunt the tracks and if any car goes and parks on the tracks they will push it to safety its fun to try and really spooky lol

The ball lightning looks like airplanes going around the storm to me. I live in florida, the lightning capital of the world, and have seen ball lightning. It was fast and streaked out from the cloud toward the ground on the north side of Lake Okachobee. It was much cooler than in that video.

Yari, that’s not a phenomenon, all rainbows are naturally a circle, but on the ground they look like the bow we know them as

so it wasn’t a “double” rainbow, it was actually just a full one

Yeah, i heard about that San Antonio thing. Spooky.
There are two gravity hills that i know of in new jersey. A man lived on a farm at the bottom of one of the roads with his daughter and one day she got raped and killed. After he died the cars began to move uphill. People suspect its his ghost keepign mpeeps away from his daughter.

there is a gravity hill in NW where i’m from, i never realized they were called that though, i just thought it was something extremely creepy when we went out and tried it for the 1st time

NW iowa, my bad

We see gravity waves quite frequently from our boat on trips from Florida to the Bahamas. It’s really amazing to see when you can see the whole sky. They sometimes seem to follow the boat.:)

Crepuscular Rays are also very beautiful. I vacation in Ely, MN and can see the rays early in the morning while hiking.

One of my favorite atmospheric affects is transonic clouds, called Prandtl-Glauert Condensation Clouds. Although not naturally occuring considering you need an aircraft traveling at transonic speeds, it’s still really cool.

heres a vid on youtube that shows it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBuIidllusc

If you have a constant source of mist, you can have a moonbow without rain. At Cumberland Falls State Park here in Kentucky, You can see a moonbow any time the moon is full, as long as its not cloudy. The rarity elsewhere is because you often have too many clouds if its raining.

Natural phenomenas are absolutely breath-taking. Mother Nature’s special gift, truly.
I’ve seen the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The one I witnessed alternated colors (red and green) too.

what about st. elmos fire?

MOUNTAIN WAVE

I’m surprised you didn’t include standing lenticular clouds, otherwise known as a “mountain wave”. When a large mass of air moves over high mountains, the warm, lower air is lifted, lowering its temperature to the dew point, where it condenses, forming a cloud and making the top of the wave visible. The air keeps moving, losing its condensation when it passes the dew line. Thus, the air is moving, but the lenticular “lens shaped” cloud remains in the same place. When conditions are right, you can see several waves in succession. I once counted fourteen successive visible waves, extending from the tops of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, clear across the Great Basin of the Great Salt Lake, to Wendover, Nevada. Fantastic!

iv seen the gravity hill in essex (hangmans hill) its scary. how comes you left out solar eclipses?

really missed the full lunar eclipse, saw it in munich couple of years ago, although it was very cloudy we were lucky seeing it for 30 sec. due to a hole in the clouds.

i really wish to see a lightning ball but cuz of our climate here in germany, it will probably not be the case to see one

Wow, these are spectacular, thanks.

Crepuscular rays are interesting, but their rarer counterpart is even better: Anti-crepuscular rays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticrepuscular_rays

I had really no idea that there are so many phnomena, but my favorite remains the crepuscular ray…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3A4CRoQA3A

Better gravity hill video IMO.

I agree with Steve about the ball lightning on the clip above being planes.
3 planes avoiding the storm by the looks of it.
Would love to see the phenomenon in real life.
Great write up, thanks.

That full circle rainbow sometimes seen from the airplane is called a “glory”. See:

Here’s the website a wikipedia

I have no idea if this has bin suggested, but you should add blood moon.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/13oct_lunareclipse.htm

look at about 3:50-3:51 mins left on the ball lightning in the upper left section..there appears 2 be a UFO or shooting star

I agree with Thomas Veg Pedersen Jr in the sense that St. Elmo’s fire would be an interesting addition. As well as the will o’ the wisp, which is a quite common phenomenon around here. Even so, “ghost lights” border too close on the paranormal to be listed in my opinion.

The ball lightning, I’m sorry to say, is not what you think it is.
The balls that are seen are the landing lights of aircraft. This is more than likely being shot near an airport. The storm is a large storm, but it is probably 50 miles away from the camera. The planes are probably flying around the storm and are 20 to 30 miles from the camera giving an optical illusion of lights near the storm. Ball lightning, from what i have heard in interviews and read in magazines, is not as bright as what is being shown in the video. Ball lightning tends to be much dimmer and usually occurs near the ground. Though it is possible to occur higher in the atmosphere, it would not be that bright. The brightness of ball lightning would be comparable to taking a 2 D-cell flashlight and standing 100 yards away looking at the light through sunglasses.

A couple of time, I’ve seen brilliant broken spectres around the shadow of the plane I’m flying in, reflected off the clouds below. Obviously, this is an extra rarity, as the angle of the sun needs to be in line with the view from your window.

when i was in hawaii there was a moonbow one night but it encircled the moon. Then the next night again the same thing happened but there were 2 moonbows. It was one of the coolest things i have ever seen.

i noticed a lot of talking about ball lightning. To give a great story a very good friend of my family lived in iowa on a farm when he was young, 60 yrs ago or so. one day he was in the barn bc a strom was coming and he had to make sure everything was scure and the animals were safe etc. there was a metal track that ran up the center of the barn for tools and to transport things from one end to the other. He turned around bc the hair on his head stood up and what he said looked like a ball of lightning (had never heard of ball lightning its was just his term) was moving towards him on the track. He moved to the side of the barn and watched it pass him at a relatively slow speed. and it hit the back of the barn and blew a 30 foot hole out of the wall. He says that the lightning was not a steady shape but it seemed like a ball of yarn with little hairs of electricity shooting out. the most frightening but awesome experience of his life.

one last thing why is Red Lightning not on here?

wow shannon, why are you hating on david? you haters prove you have no more life even less life than we do, and you can just go to hell. have u ever heard of a good memory? not common in rearted ppl

Actually, in the Ball Lightning video, I counted 4 instances of ball lightning. The first one is right away, the second and third are both focused on. But the fourth one is a little bit tricky to spot. It’s toward the end of the video. (I thought it was a white light at the top of a radio tower or something.) But you’ll notice on the very left side, there are two white lights. The bottom one is clearly a street light, and the top one doesn’t appear to move for a while, but after a while, if you keep watching it, you can see that it clearly moves.

I watched the Ball Lightning video, and kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting… I saw the aircraft, but never any atmospheric phenomena.

You can even make out the strobe light on the belly of the first plane. That one quickly rises out of the shot. The second one appears in the cloud, and again, rises out of the shot, albeit a bit shallower than the first. I would surmise that these are two outbound aircraft, with the airport between the camera and the storm. The likely reason you don’t see them rise from the ground is that they likely took off towards the storm, and the landing light and the belly strobe would have been hidden by the fuselage until the plane turned toward the camera.

The last one comes in from the left side, and descends toward that same location. That’s an incoming aircraft, also between the storm and the camera.

I saw a youtube video awhile back, that shows how little a storm actually effects flight operations. It was a Doppler weather map with an airport and the flight data for a couple dozen flights superimposed. Two storm cells passed the airport, and flights were routed through the tiny, crooked gap between them, as well as around the storm. The airport was only closed for a few minutes, when the cell was actually overhead.

Real ball lightning is probably just the ionization of the atmosphere. Highly charged gases glow: ever seen a florescent light or neon sign? Same concept.

Mariners and Pilots can tell you about a similar phenomena, St. Elmo’s Fire, which often precedes a lightning strike. Basically, it’s a glow that surrounds the craft.

Moving on: I heard of a phenomena called “Black Lightning” - I don’t know if it works with digital cameras, but film cameras frequently photographed Black Lightning. In reality, the brightness was so intense (and the aperture set so large) that it actually burned the film, which left a black positive image. Or so I’ve been told.

what about will-o-the-wisps? they are definitely worth being among these!

Jennifer Rodriguez: they didnt have school bus’s in the 20 lol

I’ve never know the name for broken specters. I hang glide, and run into that frequently, but we’ve allways called it seeing “the glory”. As stated, you can only see it when flying over a cloud.

Not a very good picture but it shows the effect.
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/gmt1/glory.jpg

The “brocken spectre” effect is also known as “heiligen Schein.”

The ball lightning video is “no longer available”.

Another interesting one is a “snow roller.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_roller

THANKS ZZZ WELL STATED. SHANNON IS THE ONE WHO NEEDS A LIFE. INSTEAD OF GOING TO HELL, JUST STOP BEING A HYPOCRITE. ALL OF THESE PHENOMS WERE COOL AND WORTH
THE TIME TO CHECK OUT THANK YOU!

We have a gravity hill in Huntsville, AL. When I was younger, my dad would always stop on the hill and put the car in neutral. It would freak me out that we were rolling uphill. Its very cool.

The most amazing phenomonon that was obviously missed here is Phosphoresence in the ocean. It tough to photograph. But what makes it so much more amazing is its the only true phenomonon that you can interact with. Imagine swimming in green sparkles on a warm night somewhere out in the ocean.
I’ve expereinced them mostly in desolation sound in British Columbia, but it can exist anywhere where the water is clean and warm enough for a certain ‘bloom’ to take place.

Thank you for teaching me the name “Brocken Spectre” today.

I had shot a video of the airplane version of it on my trip to the Bahamas in January 2006. Of course, I had no idea what to call it.

The Airplane Shadow with Brocken Spectre video can be seen here:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=3099882

Cool set! Perhaps one thing missing is a halo around the moon. I saw it once, in a clear sky, the moon had a huge halo around it. Too bad I didn’t bring a camera, it was an awesome view!

El “Relampago del Catatumbo” al sur del Lago de Maracaibo en Venezuela. Un fenomeno electrico que consiste en “rayos” entre nubes sin que los rayos lleguen a la tierra. Es un fenomeno unico que puede ser visto a muchos kilometros de distancia.
Los rayos se producen cuando NO HAY tormenta. Su genesis esta relacionada a un pantano con emanciones gaseosas que favorecen los intercambios electricos entre nubes.
Sorry but i don’t speak english.

Here’s a relatively little-known phenomenon, called “Gigantic Jets”, likened to a sprite on steroids (partway down the page): http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=24&month=08&year=2007

what time is it

wow!
it’s spectacular and fantastic!
congratulations.
kiss

Fire tornadoes?

What about fire tornadoes?

Where can i look to find a fire rainbow?

those aurora borealis are great. i haven’t seen one in reality

WOW!…………………………………..other than that, I am speechless

I am a 59 year old veteran of 22 years in the army. I have three children and two grandchildren. On May 1, 2008 during a massive thunderstorm with several reports of tonadoes, I was on my back porch watching the lightning, when I saw BLACK LIGHTNING. I not only saw it, I felt it! It was passive, almost like time took a hiccup. It was not an overexposure or trick of my eyes,as normal lightning was occurring all around me, it hit maybe 20 yards in front of me. It was deep, deep black, and the experience was almost surreal. Being almost sixty years old and totally enjoying the observation of a thunderstorm, that was the only time I have ever seen it.