Am I seeing heat lightning?

I went out earlier to get some tea and noticed some bright blue flashes in the western sky. That was at about 6:30pm. It's now 2:14am and there are still blue flashes in the western sky, but I can't hear the thunder. The weather situation is 14 deg celsius, nor'west wind blowing and the sky is clear apart from some blobs of cloud passing over.

I did a Google search and discovered it could be heat lightning! Here is the site with information on it. I did check MetService and found that there is some stormy weather forcast for the west coast, specifically Hokitika. That's 160km (100miles) away from where I live!

It is pretty cool that it's visible from so far away, and it does look spectacular in the night sky. Just posting because this is a novelty to me and I've never seen it before. It's usually raining and freezing on the odd occasion we do get lightning storms

Hi morgan,

You may be witnessing blue jets!!! I'm still a student of meteorolgy myself and I witness Sprites all the time. These phenoms are becoming more visible to the human eye for some reason. Maybe our eyes are finally catching up with our Subconcious?

Here's a Pic

Heat lightening is a misnomer.

What we see and call heat lightening is actually far off lightening in a storm on the horizon and void of thunder where we are.

You did not see heat lightening as there is no such thing.

reply to post by OrangeJuice


Blue jets? Could be. The light is visible up to a 45 degree angle from where I am, so I'm guessing whatever it is, it's pretty high in the sky with the curvature of the earth and all that.

Never heard of blue jets before

I just saw a really cool flash 30 seconds ago. It was at the 45 degree mark in the sky and it was the brightest one I've seen tonight. It looked like the flash originated from a tiny point in the sky, because as it flashed and went out, it had the same effect as when you turn off a CRT television, you know how the light shrinks to the center of the screen to a pinpoint and fades out? That's exactly how it looked, and the fact that I can see it above my neighbour's roof from here means it's pretty high up in the atmosphere eh?

[edit on 16/5/09 by dmorgan]

This subject is very New to me as well. but during some research for Tinwiki on the Sprites page I found out about Elves and Blue Jets in our atmosphere. Of course they were only discovered by Scientists in 1994 so we're not that late...

Here's another set of Blue Jets







Well take care of your eyes because these lights only last a few milliseconds so you have excellent vision. I'm still trying to draw attention to the Sprites that I see too, I've seen Sprite Light activity on ground level for a while now....