There is a digital UV-wavelength video of the corona, and a visible-wavelength video of the trees.
The paper [1] contains a sole picture with tiny circles indicating where the UV-video detected corona events, overlaid over a frame of the visible-wavelength video.
The paper does also contain a video [2] which overlays a somewhat processed version of the UV video over the visible wavelength video, where UV photon events are indicated by decaying red dots.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL11...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSuppl...
Wikimedia has a category of "photographs of the Sun":
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_of_t...
Do you think they are not photographs of the Sun because these are not what I see if I look at the sun with my eyes? (In which case I'll see pure white then perma black, I assume.)
Probably not.
At work, some guy has been pushing a 2-day feature into its 5th week now, with questions like "what do you mean by (database) table?" "Is <not_a_database_table> a database table?"
Etc...
We have to fill-in RFDs to answer those kind of questions, so the process is massively slow and st...(expunged due to HN guidelines).
So yeah, some people really love their semantics and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
[You can take a guess at where this startup will be in 2-3 years ...]
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. :)
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...
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.
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.
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.
Essentially every color photograph you have ever seen is a composite of a red photographic, a green photograph, and a blue photograph.
It's possible that this is an evolved response. Lightning hitting a tree will turn it into bark which is an excellent medium for white rot fungi. Lots of mushrooms might maximize the chance to get your spores there. Alternatively, it might mean you're dying soon and should seed out while you can.
We think of lightning strikes as rare events but when it comes to late-successional trees, they are actually one of the main disturbances. Some trees like Dipteryx oleifera have shown fascinating adaptations to lightning strikes. This tree is highly resistant to its negative effects and promotes the growth of many lianas (woody vines) that make it so when the tree is struck, so are many of its neighbors. After being struck it shows dramatically increased growth to outgrow its now-damaged neighbors
But then I got to the point in the article where they seemed to explain this wasn't visible to the naked eye.... What did I see?
I've experienced this when a strike hit power lines above my head. I didn't see the actual strike either - my friend a the other end of the driveway said it was right above me, but that sounds a little hyperbolic to me despite the ringing in my ears. I think we'd both be dead if it were that close. Either way, it gave me a lifelong respect for lightning.
I was super lucky as so much of it had bled off that it felt more like a slap that left me all tingly for hours.
Coincidence? Probably.
Very cool phenomenon to catch visually.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD03...
> Visually, the corona discharges generated on the leaves were either small purple-blue point discharges or elongated purple-blue discharges, and usually formed on the tips of the leaf closest to the source of the electric field (Figure 1). Sometimes the corona discharges were steady and constant, but other times they would dim and brighten in an unsteady pulse. When the corona was turned off, the tips of the leaf where the discharges occurred were often burned and browned, even for the weakest electric fields applied to the leaves."proves it" ?? What kind of science is that?
made me giggle
Also: "made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024", so it's possible the PopSci articles were based on early releases about this study and this is the actual study being finalized and released officially????