Re: Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: William Beaty <billb@xxxxxxxxxx>

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Tesla list wrote:

> Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> "he argon BLs look like flat-bottom
> spheres.  (But perhaps the oven's fan makes a difference, since the
> argon
> BLs were made inside an enclosed space without the fan turbulence.)"
>
> 	How big are they?  Could just be showing the shape of the internal
> electric field.

About 2" across.  They're closer to spheres than to hemispheres, but with
a definite distortion at the bottom.  They rise quickly, at maybe 5" per
second, so you don't have much time to observe.  And much of the time you
instead get plasma filaments or large gouts of flame-like plasma, rather
than rising ball-shaped discharges.

The pattern of standing waves in the oven doesn't seem to have much effect
on moving plasmas.   It does have a very large effect on the triggering of
plasma outbreaks, and sometimes you need to move things around in the oven
to find a hotspot which causes plasma.



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