There is in fact no photograph of treetops glowing.
There is a digital UV-wavelength video of the corona, and a visible-wavelength video of the trees.
The paper [1] contains a sole picture with tiny circles indicating where the UV-video detected corona events, overlaid over a frame of the visible-wavelength video.
The paper does also contain a video [2] which overlays a somewhat processed version of the UV video over the visible wavelength video, where UV photon events are indicated by decaying red dots.
Do you think they are not photographs of the Sun because these are not what I see if I look at the sun with my eyes? (In which case I'll see pure white then perma black, I assume.)
They're the same as looking at the sun with your eyes. You won't go blind looking directly for a short time. It's just best not to stare for a long time.
At work, some guy has been pushing a 2-day feature into its 5th week now, with questions like "what do you mean by (database) table?" "Is <not_a_database_table> a database table?"
Etc...
We have to fill-in RFDs to answer those kind of questions, so the process is massively slow and st...(expunged due to HN guidelines).
So yeah, some people really love their semantics and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
[You can take a guess at where this startup will be in 2-3 years ...]
Sorry, in what way is this not a photograph? Are you saying that a video is not a sequence of photographs, that UV photons captured by a sensor don’t count because human retina sensitivity is low in that range, or some hopefully-less-semantic argument?
The headline suggests that people have seen treetops glowing and it just hasn’t been captured on video before. The actual pictures and video is of something that nobody could have seen with their eyes.
I don't really blame the researchers here but this is yet another article that is happy to have a clickbait headline which any reasonable reader is going to assume will include a picture of "treetops glowing".
At least personally I scanned the article for it and only found the picture at the top, which I was then frustrated to learn that's just a lab photo, and I came here wondering where the actual image is of it in the field so I found OPs comment helpful to indicate that the suggestion there would be a beautiful picture of glowing canopy somewhere is basically a result of editorializing.
I've taken the "captured on film" out of the title above and used representative language from the article. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. (But the subject is interesting whether on film or not, let alone "for the first time".)
I once was about 30-50ft from where lightning struck, standing on my porch looking towards my neighbors' house. I didn't see the actual strike happen but I did feel my hair stand on end and then see basically this coming off of the leaves reaching up towards the sky. Little purple tentacles all reaching upwards.
But then I got to the point in the article where they seemed to explain this wasn't visible to the naked eye.... What did I see?
The article said "nearly invisible to the naked eye" (emphasis mine). Between that and the fact the researchers weren't that close to an actual lightning strike (meaning you presumably would have seen a stronger effect), I would believe you saw something.
You saw it, the human visual response curve is horribly uneven between individuals. Some can see fairly good into the UV range (especially those who have had cataract surgery,) while some can't even see 415nm violet but can see blue and red-mixed purple all day.
I've experienced this when a strike hit power lines above my head. I didn't see the actual strike either - my friend a the other end of the driveway said it was right above me, but that sounds a little hyperbolic to me despite the ringing in my ears. I think we'd both be dead if it were that close. Either way, it gave me a lifelong respect for lightning.
I've been indirectly hit by lightning, it struck my mom's house while I was running inside from the rain and at least part of it went through the wet iron handrail I was holding and hit me too.
I was super lucky as so much of it had bled off that it felt more like a slap that left me all tingly for hours.
Fun fact. Lightning strikes stimulate fungi to produce more mushrooms. Some shiitake and nameko cultivators in Japan have started using electrical shockwaves and gotten dramatically improved yields (sometimes over 200%). Interestingly enough the idea came from Japanese folklore rather than this science
It's possible that this is an evolved response. Lightning hitting a tree will turn it into bark which is an excellent medium for white rot fungi. Lots of mushrooms might maximize the chance to get your spores there. Alternatively, it might mean you're dying soon and should seed out while you can.
We think of lightning strikes as rare events but when it comes to late-successional trees, they are actually one of the main disturbances. Some trees like Dipteryx oleifera have shown fascinating adaptations to lightning strikes. This tree is highly resistant to its negative effects and promotes the growth of many lianas (woody vines) that make it so when the tree is struck, so are many of its neighbors. After being struck it shows dramatically increased growth to outgrow its now-damaged neighbors
Having lived in the PNW all my life, and worked closely with our friend Doug (the fir trees), this article brings up old mental images of otherwise healthy needles with browned (dead) tips in the crowns.
> Visually, the corona discharges generated on the leaves were either small purple-blue point discharges or elongated purple-blue discharges, and usually formed on the tips of the leaf closest to the source of the electric field (Figure 1). Sometimes the corona discharges were steady and constant, but other times they would dim and brighten in an unsteady pulse. When the corona was turned off, the tips of the leaf where the discharges occurred were often burned and browned, even for the weakest electric fields applied to the leaves.
Human eyes can be sensitive down to 380nm, the UV range goes up to 400nm. Birds and insects can see this. We can see this, using UV filters such as shown in the article. I get that it's fun to be a pedant sometimes, but come on.
> “This just goes to show that there’s still discovery science being done,” said McFarland, lead author on the paper. “For more than half a century, scientists have theorized that corona exists, but this proves it.”
The lines about oxidizers cleaning the air reminds me of the aspects of late 1800's and early 1900's product marketing oversimplifying hygiene. Bleach everything, whether it needs it or not; anything that indiscriminately kills all bacteria can only make the world a better place!
Reading the article about the unknowns here, how the electrical field interacts with the trees, and what role the produced hydroxyl plays in the atmosphere, makes me think about how daunting the idea of building a sustainable, human-friendly ecosystem off-Earth is.
A lot of the PopSci sites rotate articles so that one will publish something followed by another some time later.
Also: "made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024", so it's possible the PopSci articles were based on early releases about this study and this is the actual study being finalized and released officially????
It's not very conductive, so it won't have any appreciable discharge, but the hairs will repel each other, which is easy to see. Search for "Van de Graaff generator" and "hair", to see lots of pictures.
There is in fact no photograph of treetops glowing.
There is a digital UV-wavelength video of the corona, and a visible-wavelength video of the trees.
The paper [1] contains a sole picture with tiny circles indicating where the UV-video detected corona events, overlaid over a frame of the visible-wavelength video.
The paper does also contain a video [2] which overlays a somewhat processed version of the UV video over the visible wavelength video, where UV photon events are indicated by decaying red dots.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL11...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSuppl...
That's some weird semantic nitpicking.
Wikimedia has a category of "photographs of the Sun":
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_of_t...
Do you think they are not photographs of the Sun because these are not what I see if I look at the sun with my eyes? (In which case I'll see pure white then perma black, I assume.)
> then perma black, I assume.
Probably not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-31487662
2 replies →
They're the same as looking at the sun with your eyes. You won't go blind looking directly for a short time. It's just best not to stare for a long time.
Lol.
At work, some guy has been pushing a 2-day feature into its 5th week now, with questions like "what do you mean by (database) table?" "Is <not_a_database_table> a database table?"
Etc...
We have to fill-in RFDs to answer those kind of questions, so the process is massively slow and st...(expunged due to HN guidelines).
So yeah, some people really love their semantics and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
[You can take a guess at where this startup will be in 2-3 years ...]
Sorry, in what way is this not a photograph? Are you saying that a video is not a sequence of photographs, that UV photons captured by a sensor don’t count because human retina sensitivity is low in that range, or some hopefully-less-semantic argument?
The headline suggests that people have seen treetops glowing and it just hasn’t been captured on video before. The actual pictures and video is of something that nobody could have seen with their eyes.
4 replies →
I don't really blame the researchers here but this is yet another article that is happy to have a clickbait headline which any reasonable reader is going to assume will include a picture of "treetops glowing".
At least personally I scanned the article for it and only found the picture at the top, which I was then frustrated to learn that's just a lab photo, and I came here wondering where the actual image is of it in the field so I found OPs comment helpful to indicate that the suggestion there would be a beautiful picture of glowing canopy somewhere is basically a result of editorializing.
Maybe they take issue with the word "glowing", which doesn't usually refer to invisible electromagnetic radiation
2 replies →
While we're being unreasonably pedantic, it also wasn't caught on film because it was a digital camera.
I've taken the "captured on film" out of the title above and used representative language from the article. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. (But the subject is interesting whether on film or not, let alone "for the first time".)
[dead]
I once was about 30-50ft from where lightning struck, standing on my porch looking towards my neighbors' house. I didn't see the actual strike happen but I did feel my hair stand on end and then see basically this coming off of the leaves reaching up towards the sky. Little purple tentacles all reaching upwards.
But then I got to the point in the article where they seemed to explain this wasn't visible to the naked eye.... What did I see?
The article said "nearly invisible to the naked eye" (emphasis mine). Between that and the fact the researchers weren't that close to an actual lightning strike (meaning you presumably would have seen a stronger effect), I would believe you saw something.
You saw it, the human visual response curve is horribly uneven between individuals. Some can see fairly good into the UV range (especially those who have had cataract surgery,) while some can't even see 415nm violet but can see blue and red-mixed purple all day.
> I did feel my hair stand on end
I've experienced this when a strike hit power lines above my head. I didn't see the actual strike either - my friend a the other end of the driveway said it was right above me, but that sounds a little hyperbolic to me despite the ringing in my ears. I think we'd both be dead if it were that close. Either way, it gave me a lifelong respect for lightning.
I've been indirectly hit by lightning, it struck my mom's house while I was running inside from the rain and at least part of it went through the wet iron handrail I was holding and hit me too.
I was super lucky as so much of it had bled off that it felt more like a slap that left me all tingly for hours.
[dead]
Fun fact. Lightning strikes stimulate fungi to produce more mushrooms. Some shiitake and nameko cultivators in Japan have started using electrical shockwaves and gotten dramatically improved yields (sometimes over 200%). Interestingly enough the idea came from Japanese folklore rather than this science
It's possible that this is an evolved response. Lightning hitting a tree will turn it into bark which is an excellent medium for white rot fungi. Lots of mushrooms might maximize the chance to get your spores there. Alternatively, it might mean you're dying soon and should seed out while you can.
We think of lightning strikes as rare events but when it comes to late-successional trees, they are actually one of the main disturbances. Some trees like Dipteryx oleifera have shown fascinating adaptations to lightning strikes. This tree is highly resistant to its negative effects and promotes the growth of many lianas (woody vines) that make it so when the tree is struck, so are many of its neighbors. After being struck it shows dramatically increased growth to outgrow its now-damaged neighbors
Having lived in the PNW all my life, and worked closely with our friend Doug (the fir trees), this article brings up old mental images of otherwise healthy needles with browned (dead) tips in the crowns.
Coincidence? Probably.
Very cool phenomenon to catch visually.
Maybe not a coincidence! The previous research linked in the article mentions this in lab testing:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD03...
[flagged]
Human eyes can be sensitive down to 380nm, the UV range goes up to 400nm. Birds and insects can see this. We can see this, using UV filters such as shown in the article. I get that it's fun to be a pedant sometimes, but come on.
It would be amazing if there was an electrical mechanism behind crown shyness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness
Great time to read about St Elmo's Fire!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elmo's_fire
Sounds like a man in motion :)
I notice the article, the paper, and the "plain language" summary of the paper don't mention the common term for this phenomenon, St Elmo's fire.
> “This just goes to show that there’s still discovery science being done,” said McFarland, lead author on the paper. “For more than half a century, scientists have theorized that corona exists, but this proves it.”
"proves it" ?? What kind of science is that?
The lines about oxidizers cleaning the air reminds me of the aspects of late 1800's and early 1900's product marketing oversimplifying hygiene. Bleach everything, whether it needs it or not; anything that indiscriminately kills all bacteria can only make the world a better place!
Reading the article about the unknowns here, how the electrical field interacts with the trees, and what role the produced hydroxyl plays in the atmosphere, makes me think about how daunting the idea of building a sustainable, human-friendly ecosystem off-Earth is.
What is new here? I thought corona discharges during storms had already been well known for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elmo%27s_fire
Article claims it had never been seen outside the lab before (for trees specifically I guess)
> They chose the Sunshine State because of its propensity to produce frequent thunderstorms
made me giggle
I've seen these images before, or some very similar images. So this is based on old photos or it has indeed been done before.
A lot of the PopSci sites rotate articles so that one will publish something followed by another some time later.
Also: "made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024", so it's possible the PopSci articles were based on early releases about this study and this is the actual study being finalized and released officially????
Storm troopers, but not the kind you'd expect.
Will head hair on humans do this too?
It's not very conductive, so it won't have any appreciable discharge, but the hairs will repel each other, which is easy to see. Search for "Van de Graaff generator" and "hair", to see lots of pictures.
Wouldn't we smell it if it did?