Re: Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>

"About 2" across.  They're closer to spheres than to hemispheres, but
with
a definite distortion at the bottom.  They rise quickly, at maybe 5" per
second, so you don't have much time to observe.  And much of the time
you
instead get plasma filaments or large gouts of flame-like plasma, rather
than rising ball-shaped discharges.

The pattern of standing waves in the oven doesn't seem to have much
effect
on moving plasmas.   It does have a very large effect on the triggering
of
plasma outbreaks, and sometimes you need to move things around in the
oven
to find a hotspot which causes plasma."

	OK.  That's about a half wave at  2450 MHz, but maybe irrelevent.  If
you have discharge volumes that large the internal fields will be
distorted enough that it's hard to visualize their distribution.  I can
see I have to do some experiments here.  I do have an old microwave oven
in the garage which I've been tempted to use but haven't done so yet
since my wife still uses it on occasion and I don't want to yuk it up.
As for the one in the kitchen, no way.  Peace and quiet is too valuable
to cause a fuss about that.

Ed