Thunder storms can create beautiful displays in the sky as electricity builds up in the clouds then shoots towards the ground in dazzling bursts of energy.
But scientists have now used high speed cameras to capture lightning strikes as they happen, revealing there is a beguiling beauty behind these violent storms.
Ultra-slow motion footage captured by physicists in Florida reveals the way the charged particles move in forked patterns before lighting up the sky when they reach the ground.
'Lightning is one of the most fascinating atmospheric phenomena on Earth,' said Professor Ningyu Liu from the Florida Institute of Technology.
'However, little is known about how lightning starts in thunderclouds, moves through air, and then strikes objects on ground.'
Professor Liu filmed the storm during tests on a new camera for its ultimate use.
'The video shows the downward propagation of "leaders" that are electrical discharge processes responsible for creating hot lightning channels,' Professor Liu told MailOnline.
'As the leaders propagate downward, they branch and take tortuous paths. At present, the physics of leader propagation is not fully understood.
'The contact of the leader with ground leads to a return stroke, the brightest stage of a lightning flash. In the video, the return stroke at the final moment highly saturates the camera detector.'
The research team hopes to study the dynamics of the upward electrical discharges from thunderstorms known as starters, jets and gigantic jets.
When storm clouds develop they become highly charged, with the uppermost layer accumulating more positively charged ions, while the lower parts of the clouds become more negative.
As the charges separate it creates an electric field, with the air acting as a buffer stopping the flow from negative to positive.
The charge builds until it overcomes the insulator, forming lightning either within the cloud, known as sheet lightning, or striking the ground, known as fork lightning.
In fork lightning, a channel of negative charge, called a stepped leader, will zigzag down towards the ground in roughly 150 foot (45 metre) segments, creating a forked pattern.
This stepped leader is normally invisible to the human eye, and shoots to the ground in less time than it takes to blink.
But scientists at Florida Institute of Technology used a high-speed camera to capture an amazing lighting flash from near the university's Melbourne campus.
It shows the forked pattern of the lightning as it shoots towards the ground.
The flash was recorded at 7,000 frames per second (FPS), but the playback speed seen in the video is 700 FPS.
This video was filmed as part of tests on the camera.
'We are currently testing the camera and still waiting for a couple of optical components to complete our observation system,' Professor Lui told MailOnline. 'I expect it will be ready for research in the middle of this summer.'
While the familiar flashes and forks of electrical light are known to follow a gradient of charged particles, exactly how the initial spark forms has been unclear.
But earlier this year a rare, powerful type of lightning helped scientists unravel how such strikes begin during a thunderstorm.
A rare type of lightning called narrow bipolar events (NPE), can be far more powerful than typical lightning strikes, is caused by the flow of positive charge.
It typically occurs when charge jumps from the positive top of the storm clouds to pools of negative charge on the ground.
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