While looking at this youtube video of lightning in 1000 fps I was somewhat surprised that such a frame rate is enough to capture the propagation of lightning.
I have no clue about photography or physics, but the naive questions I want to ask are:
- How "quickly" does lightning propagate, and what are the main contributing factors to the propagation speed (e.g density of clouds etc)?
- What exactly is propagating? It can't be light, since it's much too fast, so somehow the "sequence of discharges" that is lightning propagates. Why does it do this?