Strange "shooting star" formation

[Lims Tims]

Hello strangers,

forgive me my bad english first, i am from germany and some days ago there was a strange formation of shooting stars (i call it that way) at the sky, i want to share it with you.

I like to watch shooting stars and some years ago i was lucky to see a big meteor shower.
I never seen before something similar to this thing i call "shooting star" formation at such angle falling down.
I never had seen such a zigzag anywhere at the sky before.
I made a basic drawing out of it and hand on heart, it's precise like it could be, from my point of view.
It was visible for 3-5sec. max and the "falling speed" was slower - related to other shooting stars.
It had same light intensity like lightning, but stayed there for a much longer time and all vanished at once.
I painted it, because i made a google search to find something related to it, but without "too much" phantasy included, i can not find anything about it.
Has someone an answer for me, what i had seen there?
Greetings

[Solar]

Hello.

Maybe "Ball Lightning" also called "Plasmoid"?

Very rare, appears during, or near, thunderstorms. Ball lightning can zig-zag, it can bounce, it can float.

Video: Ball Lightning - New Orleans - April 02, 2012

Video: Artificial ball lightning in a vodka bottle

Video: Strangest Weather On Earth: Balls of Lightning!

Video: Ball Lightning during thunderstorm - Quebec, Canada

Video: Floating Ball Lightning in the Sky captured on video in North Dakota

[JP Michael]

Do you have a date on which you observed the phenomenon? Also, which part of Germany did you make the observation from? It is possible to check the northern hemisphere auroral/current strengths relative to your location at the time you made your observation.

What you've described sounds like an auroral sheet plasma which has possibly pinched into an intense glow-arc mode. I'm reading Anthony Peratt's Physics of the Plasma Universe and I just finished a section where he mentions:

Figure 2.15 depicts a series of single-frame photographs of the phosphor screen showing the beam shape at the anode as the beam voltage was increased. Here we see that the sheet beam rotates as a rigid rod through an angle of about 30°. Beyond this angle, the beam begins to fold into charge bunches, producing vortex patterns on the phosphorus plate. At a certain critical voltage, the vortices disrupt, producing a violent oscillation. These oscillations have a complex waveform indicating a rather broadband frequency distribution. The bandwidth increases rapidly with beam voltage." [1]

Figure 2.15 is similar to this image:



Try a picture search for "auroral plasma", "auroral curtains" and/or "auroral plasma instability" and see if those come closer to what you saw.

Samples:







[1] Anthony Peratt, Physics of the Plasma Universe (Springer, 2015), p.72-74.

@Solar
That second video you posted is demonstrative, I think, of ball plasma formation in storms. Notice the metal coils which are condensing the xenon plasma into a tight ball? The xenon starts as a doughnut/halo and then condenses into a high-energy-density ball (plasmoid). Is it that lightning ball plasmas have found themselves likewise 'condensed' into an invisible electromagnetic plasma coil(s) within the thunderstorm's frontal updraft currents?

[Lims Tims]

Oh ty for your replys
Interesting stuff you posted, much to read.

About my formation, i was wrong!
I have double glass windows "thermopane" and when it's dark outside and i watch the moon from inside, i get a "mirror clone reflection" of the moon.
That means i can split my drawing vertically in half, to get closer to reality for my lightning thing.
Then it could have been a ball lightning, my first one.
Watched many thunderstorms, really like the power of mother nature, but never had such a ball - lightning thing before.
Greetings

[Solar]

@Solar
That second video you posted is demonstrative, I think, of ball plasma formation in storms. Notice the metal coils which are condensing the xenon plasma into a tight ball? The xenon starts as a doughnut/halo and then condenses into a high-energy-density ball (plasmoid). Is it that lightning ball plasmas have found themselves likewise 'condensed' into an invisible electromagnetic plasma coil(s) within the thunderstorm's frontal updraft currents?

The Artificial Ball Lightning in Vodka Bottle is one of my favorites. Initially, the plasmoid did seem to spherically condense, stabilize, and circulate only while within the coil of wire on the outside of the glass bottle. Sometimes it became a donut, or toroid. I can't tell if the appearance as a "ball" might have actually been a tight toroid. Some of the actual plasmoids produced during Nature's thunderstorms have been observed to pass through glass, and walls and barely leave a mark. See:

Electric Plasmoids by Stephen Smith

Google: "Radio Frequency Plasmoids" <---- Fun research topic!