![]() ![]() In 2020, MIT scientists discovered that St Elmo's fire can actually be used to cushion airplanes during flights by using the phenomenon to control the electrical discharge of an aircraft. The ions generated eventually pass the charge to nearby areas of lower potential, or recombine to form neutral gas molecules. Unlike halos, the corona is produced with water droplets and not ice crystals. In stormy weather, the number of ions is more than normal, and as such corona occurs at much less voltage as compared with fair weather. A corona discharge is a process by which a current flows from an electrode with a high potential into a neutral fluid, usually air, by ionizing that fluid so as to create a region of plasma around the electrode. Corona discharge has plenty of technical applications, including helping protect airplanes from dangerous lightning strikes. However, ring around the moon or sun can be as a result of a phenomenon known as corona and is often confused with moon halo. Elmo’s Fire is an age-old weather phenomenon first observed thousands of years ago and eventually named for the patron saint of sailors, St. Natural phenomena are obviously neither good nor evil, but they can be useful. St Elmo's Fire, Now An Important Technology Weather Underground provides local & long-range weather forecasts, weatherreports, maps & tropical weather conditions for the Corona area. There have been sightings of it from airplanes that have crashed, like Air France flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 killing all on board, but it's not thought the St Elmo#s fire was a factor. These days, sightings of the phenomenon are often linked to airplanes as it can occur along the wings and nose of aircraft. Survivorship bias may link the phenomenon with a blessing because sailors that saw St Elmo’s fire atop their mast before a lighting strike may not have survived to tell the tale. ![]() St Elmo’s fire can also warn of an imminent lightning strike. Famously, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest it is the very sign preceding the eponymous storm. Because it often accompanies stormy weather, many sailors saw it as a bad omen too. In meteorology, a corona (plural coronae) is an optical phenomenon produced by the diffraction of sunlight or moonlight (or, occasionally, bright starlight or planetlight) by individual small water droplets and sometimes tiny ice crystals of a cloud or on a foggy glass surface. Not all of its connotations are positive, however. "The sea was so highly luminous, that the tracks of the penguins were marked by a fiery wake, and the darkness of the sky was momentarily illuminated by the most vivid lightning." St Elmo's Fire, A Sign Of Misfortune To Come? “On a second night we witnessed a splendid scene of natural fireworks the mast-head and yard-arm-ends shone with St.Elmo's light and the form of the vane could almost be traced, as if it had been rubbed with phosphorous," Charles Darwin wrote in July 1832 in The Voyage Of The Beagle.
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