Chased the storms that were approaching Camden yesterday from Picton. Quite lightning active and some reasonable structures around! In one case, the lightning pulsed several times and a fire ball at the point of contact could be observed! 
After this storm, I moved towards Plumpton to watch the last cell near Penrith which also was lightning active as Harley Pearman confirmed!
3 thought on “Sydney Lightning SW Suburbs 23rd January 2015”
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These are great lightning photos. I saw this storm in the distance to the south and I contemplated going down to that region to investigate it at one stage. As it was, a separate storm cell developed near Luddenham to the north of that cell so I concentrated on that one. At least both storm cells across the outer south west Sydney were covered in some capacity.
The cell I experienced was similar to the cell Jimmy intercepted. It too was lightning active but I did not do any lightning photography on the cell I intercepted. In my case and despite the lightning, I concentrated on cloud structure and tried to look for hail fall. I found no hail despite keeping up with the base over a wide area. Instead, I did enjoy some localised flooding from heavy rain and a magnificant rainbow to conclude the event.
As it was, I had a scare which could have been serious if I had completely gone away from the car or left the car. I had parked my car close to two power poles (not underneath them) but some 15 metres away. I had the car door open but I was seated inside. I turned my head to look towards the power poles and a powerful lightning strike blasted something so close. I heard an explosion as well as a blinding flash of light with an instant ear piercing thunderclap. I am just glad I was in the car and not out.
My storm produced a number of powerful lightning strikes in a small area just east of Luddenham before the storm went into decline. I will attach some images once I have worked on my photos.
Please find a small selection of photos from my storm. As stated, I did not target the lightning strikes in my storm but went for structure instead.
The second photo was taken from the southern side of the storm and I was viewing this base. It would be interesting to see what the base looked like from the eastern side. This disappeared quite rapidly after I took a number of photos of this.
The storm produced some localised flooding due to the amount of rain falling and its slow movement.
Towards the end of its life, I was treated to a spectacular double rainbow. The rainbow ended the chase thereafter and I returned home.
By the time the rainbow was visible, the storm had stopped producing lightning flashes.