Supercell Lightning through Sunset

A small cluster of thunderstorms would form over far northeastern Illinois late in the afternoon on 9/11/19. The strongest of these storms acquired supercell characteristics and prompted a Tornado Warning in the area. The storm produced quite a lightning show which was visible from miles away thanks to the lack of clouds surrounding this storm.
I was accompanied by a number of flying companions throughout the recording of this video who were interested in a blood meal. They were nice enough to stay out of the video frame.... for the most part.

[@dougmayhew]

Looking wonderful

[@James.99]

Thunderstorms are my favorite weather for some reason ...unless it's 115 degrees during the summer, because I live in California and that lightning causes devastating fires

[@Pigeon.mp4]

damn i wish i got photogenic supercells in ontario

[@simplydifferent7712]

Wow. I only missing the thunder.

[@thelightninghunter23]

You couldn't hear any if it. The storm was over 10 miles away.

[@annes9324]

Awesome captures... fantastic documentary! Keep up the great work!

[@majaspaltenstein9022]

Mesmerizing phenomenon

[@leesweather9894]

Atmosphere learning to scour out Trumpism. Great video.

[@MesoscaleMikeyChasing]

Love. It!

[@leilablack9232]

Was there tornado sirens?

[@thelightninghunter23]

Yup, the sirens at the start were a live recording from the event at my location.

[@marshallsweatherhiking1820]

Nice video. I have a question. I notice very few horizontal “rolling shutter” flicker lines in this video, even with the quickest flashes. Do you know what it is that makes the Galway 9 so much better at lightning? Are there any other cameras like this on the market?

[@thelightninghunter23]

I think the S9 interlaces the scanning to some degree. I've noticed that in a few captures of fast events there is a series of parallel lines instead of a single sharp boundary like with my other camera which uses a traditional rolling shutter. There is a gap between basic slow-motion cameras (120-240fps) and more professional high-speed cameras. Interestingly, the gap is being somewhat closed by newer flagship smartphones which have made great progress in camera quality over recent years. The cheapest device that I know of that can record >240fps for extended periods of time is actually the OnePlus 6 series of smartphones which I was really hoping to get but my carrier doesn't support it. There's drawbacks with phones, though, as important settings such as focus and ISO are not manually adjustable. Without knowing a useful trick to "latch" the AF on my phone, getting a decent lightning capture would be quite difficult.

[@marshallsweatherhiking1820]

@@thelightninghunter23 Thanks for responding. Yea. I was actually interested in getting a stand-alone waterproof camcorder like the GoPro Hero 7 Black, but I noticed the lightning recorded on it still had bad rolling shutter line issues. I really wish I understood how the technology of CMOS sensors worked. It seems the problem with most consumer-grade cameras these days is the sensor read/reset cycle is set to match the framerate while in video mode. If the camera would just read the full sensor at a speed that's a few times faster than the exposure period of a given line, splitting artifacts would be much less frequent. Even 60fps without splits would make me happy as you can slow it down 8x to 7.5fps and interpolate to 30fps for decent slo-mo. You could actually do this with the old global shutter CCD cameras, but the upgrade to CMOS ruined it. You couldn't get streamers and such, but you could make lightning at least look cinematic. Slowing down any flash with splits looks pretty awful.

[@user-qr4iz7yb1l]

真下では人が震えるほどに恐怖におののく猛烈な雷雨、

[@user-qr4iz7yb1l]

積乱雲よう発達してんなー、(笑)

[@majaspaltenstein9022]

Mesmerizing phenomenon