Check this out:
It’s the aurora australis, or southern lights, seen from above! It was taken May 29, 2010 from the International Space Station. Bad Astronomy talks about what causes aurorae in the blog post where I found the picture.
Seriously: The aurora. From space. How cool is that?
I was looking up the proper term for a plasma lamp and stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for the Zeusaphone.
It’s a Tesla Coil that’s set up to modulate its discharges so that they produce specific notes. In other words, it’s a Tesla Coil that plays music using lightning!
Seriously… how can you turn down a description like that?
It’s also been called a “thoremin,” — another lightning-god-based pun, this one on the theramin,
The company that makes them has a couple of video clips on their website, but sadly they’re a little underwhelming on a 200-pixel window with computer speakers. I imagine they’d be seriously impressive in person.
Photo by Dracoswinsauer. Used per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
