Lightning in a bottle

I was working on a photo illustration and things just didn’t work quite right. I had one idea but when I ran the photo past the editor she couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. Giant eyeball, Petri dish or maybe a beehive? Nope it was actually a Luminglass.

The first time I saw one of these it was a prop in one of the Start Trek movies. Cool looking electric bolts flying around a thin piece of glass. At night in a dark room the effect is fantastic using an electric current on an inert gas.

It is a lot like a plasma ball only flat. I have one of those too and the pair can really shoot off the sparks. The random arcing of the current along the glass surface favors a slow shutter speed to show the number of arcs and their movement about the glass plate and the ball’s inner surface.