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Purple lightning has been captured striking an area directly behind the Statue of Liberty as New York City was hit by a dramatic thunderstorm. The intense lightning rod was filmed from a dock on Ellis Island after the storm rolled over the city on Wednesday afternoon. In the 21-second clip, which was posted to Twitter, the lightning blasted down behind the Statue of Liberty and lit up the surrounding city. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8552053/Dramatic-moment-lightning-strikes-Statue-Liberty-New-York-City-hit-thunderstorm.html --- You can watch the video on the link provided. To those of you good at reading maps and science, please tell me what you think of my findings. 1) The lightning struck behind the statue. I was wondering what it hit. I checked google map and there's a flagpole behind the statue: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Island/@40.6898332,-74.0464527,18z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c2508ed1e8d553:0x79084fab31e7ed6c!8m2!3d40.6895453!4d-74.0449292 Judging from the video, I believe the lightning hit the flagpole as it was directly behind the statue. 2) I read this from a Twitter user: "So, the lightening isn’t hitting the statue, the lag between the bolt & the thunder (about 10 sec) puts the actual strike about <2 miles away from the camera, nearer Ellis Island/Jersey. Great perspective though." Judging from the video, I have to disagree with this. The ferry where the video was taken was in front of the statue. Ellis Island is farther away on the left side of the statue. As for the distance from the ferry to the statue, it's about 350 meters away. From the Statue to the flagpole, about 175 meters away. So, from the flagpole to the ferry it's about 525 meters away. The ferry has a route line on google map, so I measured from there. According to this user he said that there's about 10 secs lag between the bolt and the thunder. I disagree. I checked the video, it's only about 1.5 secs lag. The video was muffled by the uploader due to the noise of the wind, but I can still hear the thunder when the volume is set to max. I checked the temperature it's about 23 degrees centigrade according to timeanddate.com. At that temperature, sound travels at 349.99 m/s." So, to calculate the actual distance between the ferry and the flagpole where I believe the lightning hit: 349.99 x 1.5 secs lag = 524.98 meters. This is almost the same as the distance measured from google maps. Tell me what you think. Thanks.