I think I just got about as close as physically possible to lightning. Of course I was indoors and it was outside, but never mind that. I’m just sitting here minding my own business grading UBT’s and there is this marvelous flash and crack – not the normal delayed crack, but an instant crack like right outside my window. Ok, so that means the lightning was pretty close.
Now, the convincing part is that after this, when I was done shitting myself and could see again, both of my monitors were marvelously gaussed. The one parallel to the window had this effect fairly evenly over the whole thing. The one semi-perpendicular to the window had it much more defined to the side near the window.
I’m not sure how far the magnetic field extends around lightning (I think I actually know how to calculate it if I want to) but I think it drops proportional to the inverse square of the distance so for it to affect one half of my monitor and not the other would seem to indicate that the strike was damn close.
