Awesome Lightning Photos, Videos from Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania was lucky enough to get some decent lightning (for late March!) last night and some of the Pennsylvania Storm Chasers on Facebook scored some excellent pics & video. The highlight was this video by Edward Ramolt, where he caught lightning striking a couple hundred feet away on his iPod in Pittsburgh (click to play):

Ron Shawley also got some great shots from Chickaree Mountain up above Johnstown:

He also got several shots of "ground-to-cloud" lightning (upwards striking) from the local power plant:

I was barely awake for the 9:30 storms, which popped up suddenly, so all I got was this quick video of a cloud-to-cloud strike (with birds - that's a new one), which is slowed down to 1/4 speed here:

All told, about 8.700 lightning strikes hit the ground in and around the state yesterday evening:

All quite impressive considering that storms were forming while temperatures were in the 40s (midnight temps shown)!