Sky lit up bright green
 

About a month ago, we got a big snowstorm here in central Ohio. Since I just moved here from Florida and hadn't seen snow in years, I was looking out my window enjoying the sight at about 5:15am.

As I was watching the snow, my lights dimmed slightly and I heard a distant humming noise. Then about 5 seconds later the sky lit up bright neon green for about 2 seconds. My initial thought given the lights dimming and the snow/ice was that a transformer blew, however they typically make a loud bang and a bluish white flash. This was a bright green and was totally silent aside from the humming noise I heard a few seconds prior.

I was not able to tell where it came from, but it appeared to light up the sky from below, in a way you'd expect from something like a bomb exploding. The most similar looking thing you'd encounter normally would be lightning, but I've never seen it light up the sky bright green for a sustained 2 seconds!

I turned off my lights so I could get a better view and sat there waiting for something else to happen. About 2-3 minutes later I saw the lights inside the house across the street come on. Then the outside lights turned on, and my neighbor opened his side door, looked back and forth a few times, and then went back inside, as if he heard something outside his house and wanted to investigate.

Has anybody else ever seen anything like this? I thought it was really bizarre. I googled it and found one person's mention of basically the same thing as I saw (1-second emerald green flash that lit up the sky) but no further elaboration.

I remember a bizarre snow/lightening storm when I was a teenager. I was in a car and didn't hear any noise (that I recall). I do remember that there were brilliant flashes of lightening that lit the sky purple, green, and pinkish and would last for several seconds at a time. The whole sky would be illuminated in a way that you don't normally see with lightening. It was very odd indeed, but completely natural.

I've seen it, too. A big electrical storm here in Perth a few months ago, had flashes of green in the sky all throughout it. It blew my mind.

Maybe some type of St. Elmo's Fire?

i agree with carn, sounds like a st. elmos fire, medusa's sounds a little suspicious though

well if it was snowing/raining the water could possibly refract the light coming from the lightning and give you those colors...but thats just a guess

Snow and lightning can ammount to some amazing visuals. I was once awoken by a loud bang and a flash so bright, that everything turned white for a few seconds. I was sure a bomb went off. It was, in fact, snowing heavily outside, and the snowflakes multiplied the lightnings visual efect. I guess that lightning might come in different colors, too, but I'm no expert when it comes to these things.

Suspicious as in odd or as in I made it up???

I think he meant suspicious in that it might be the culprit..

That's how I interpreted it, anyhow.

It may have been a solar flare that caused Northern Lights / St. Elmo's fire, and also disrupted the power at the same time.

Or, it was little green men that were coming to kidnap rednecks to anal probe...

Your call on which theory makes more sense. :)

I always thought st elmo's fire was blue.

This is a perfect moment for some Lewis Black.

A green flash is typical of a transformer explosion. I've seen a few blow, and I've never seen a blue flash like you describe. Transformers can hum when overloaded, and that's probably what you heard.

I saw something like that once too. the sky totally turned greenish and bright at night. It reflected against the snow and looked cool, but the light was steady, didn't fluctuate at all. You could've read by it...I wasn't alone....a whole group of us saw it. Weird.

dont metallic meteors burn green when they enter the atmosphere?
could be the snow amplifing the light from a meteor burn?

Maybe Rosanne Barr lit a fart

Well first, nitrogen when electricity is passed through it emits green light. I have seen large electrical storms without the snow but a heavy rain that were pure green and Matrix Revolutions like :hehe:. I have my own fun, Mother-Nature-shows-us-we're-inferior stories.

I was on the road during this massive down pour. We couldn't see 30 feet infront of us... but you know how I and the driver did? Lightning. There were bolts every five senconds for minutes. And I mean biblical bolts of smiting power that arced, I kid you not from horizon to horizon. The sky filled completely with brilliant white and purple zigzagged slashes. It was so scary but beautiful.

And the amazing weather we're having now. I live in IL and we had weather that went from 7F to 40F, back to 9F. That day of 40F there was a fog cover so thick that the roads were completely lined with people pulled over. There wasnt anywhere left to stop the car. The fog covered most of IL, WI, and IN (so said the weatherman). This was after the tsunami, and just after that other earthquake, and then a freak mudslide in Calfornia that burried houses.

-If any of you get the chance, Steven King's "The Skeleton Crew", the short story the Mist is great. It came back to me that day.

Those days were fairly scarry but luckily I thought, "If it weren't for my horse." - Lewis Black

Read the Mist by Frank Herbert. Brit horror writing at its best.

Or watch "The Fog" by John Carpenter?

-Mikey

Maybe, Eddie (from "National Lampoons Christmas Vacation") was emptying the "shitter" into the sewer!! :lol:

Arg, damn yous!!

I think MrSelfDestruct hit the nail on the head. It's a transformer blowing up, I've seen it around here plenty of times during some of our bad ice storms. Big BOOM, and then the sky lights up a pretty green.


Mistery solved. :thumbsup:

http://205.243.100.155/frames/mpg/XfrmBlast1.mpg
Here's a daytime explosion video (5.1mb) that shows just how violently a transformer can explode. A fault in the low-voltage side caused a ground arc, which fused most of the internal metal parts together and boiled the mineral oil that normally keeps it cool and insulated. As the oil boiled, pressure release valves sprayed boiling and gaseous oil into the air, and when the pressure ruptured the tank, the arc ignited the mist and blew chunks of transformer housing and globs of burning oil into the air.