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by addaon23 hours ago |
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upvoteby clickety_clack22 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby eel21 hours ago|
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This reminds me of a chat room interaction I had maybe 25 years ago. The other person was adamant that humans can't see the infrared from TV remotes, and I was adamant that I could. It was pretty a widespread belief (even in school science books) at that time that humans couldn't see infrared. Since then more science was done to prove that, in fact, some humans can see some infrared under some conditions.

I share that mainly to state that humans are amazing and have a wide and inconsistent range of capabilities (and sometimes even mutating into new capabilities!) Personally, I will always hesitate to say "nobody" and I lean towards "no typical human" instead. :)

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upvoteby lukan17 hours ago|
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I suppose this also depends on the types of remote controls? There are some where I can see red and some where I cannot.
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upvoteby MisterTea17 hours ago|
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The faint red glow is actual red light as many IR LED's (esp the ones used in cameras for night illumination) are close to the visible spectrum and have some visible light emission.
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upvoteby formerly_proven16 hours ago|
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850nm is easily visible, but most remotes are 940nm, which is also visible as a faint purple glow but the source needs to be really bright.
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upvoteby dtgriscom17 hours ago|
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Isn't infrared, by definition, wavelengths beyond what people can see?
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upvoteby jibal11 hours ago|
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Which people? And no, it's not defined that way: "radiation having a wavelength between about 700 nanometers and 1 millimeter"
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upvoteby WarmWash22 hours ago|
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You can absolutely see corona discharge like that with your eyes.

If you come to my day job, and we shut off all the lights in the test room, after your eyes adjust in the dark for a minute, you'll see the soft purple glow coming from the edge our 160kV test rig.

Definitely emits UV, but there is enough visible to see it for sure. It comes from the electrons exciting nitrogen in the air.[1]

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nitrogen_discharge_t...

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upvoteby yetihehe21 hours ago|
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> (1:If you come to my day job), and (2: we shut off all the lights) (3:in the test room), (4:after your eyes adjust in the dark for a minute), you'll see the soft purple glow coming (5:from the edge our 160kV test rig).

So, 5 different things that make it glow "not coming from treetops". Parent poster wanted to see glowing treetops in a forest, where we might not be adjusted to dark for a minute.

You can also see such corona discharge with benchtop tesla coils even in lighted room, but those are not trees in forest glowing from a storm.

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upvoteby MisterTea17 hours ago|
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Even a smallish Tesla coil easily produces voltages north of 160kV. I built one using 4" PVC for the secondary with a wound length of maybe ~2 feet of secondary? From memory of the calculations I did at the time I think it was around 350 kV peak? Might have been higher. Threw 24 inch sparks quite easily.
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upvoteby clickety_clack16 hours ago|
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I’m not saying it can’t be seen, I’m saying that you can’t prove something can be seen by showing me a photo that captures light that I can’t see.
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upvoteby ajkjk22 hours ago|
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what's the job?
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upvoteby chrisfosterelli22 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby colanderman11 hours ago|
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Which photograph? The one in the article is not from the paper. The paper contains no photographs of corona.
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upvoteby adammarples22 hours ago|
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Maybe they take issue with the word "glowing", which doesn't usually refer to invisible electromagnetic radiation
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upvoteby Brian_K_White21 hours ago|
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I was going to say the same.

It's true that the image isn't fiction or a purely fabricated "artists rendering" from data. But it's also true that "filmed" and "glowing" are unusual ways to refer to what happened.

You don't usually say filmed when talking about recording uv or microwaves etc. You technically could, and probably back when film was actually how uv was recorded a few people working in the field probably did, but almost no one else does, or no one at all since decades, which means the author of the title is the one out of step, not the people reading it.

They actually recorded something, and this title is misleading. Both things are true.

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upvoteby amluto18 hours ago|
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When I worked in a lab that took videos with a UV camera, I still called them videos, and I would absolutely have said that I took a video of the subject (a methanol flame in this case).

Essentially every color photograph you have ever seen is a composite of a red photographic, a green photograph, and a blue photograph.

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