I was curious because we are in a thunderstorm right now and at 9pm, some of those lightning bolts, from even like half a mile away, seem like they are lighting things up comparably to the sun.
Here is a discussion with some (seemingly) reasonable order-of-magnitude estimates: https://www.quora.com/How-many-lumens-does-a-lightning-bolt-produce-and-how-does-this-compare-to-other-light-sources
Lots.
I saw a discussion a while ago about lumens from a xenon photography flash, the numbers were crazy high, but obviously only for a very brief period.
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Gotta be at least 999,999,000 lemons.
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Almost as many lumens as the Imalent SR32.
Convert 1.21Gw (gigawatts) to lumens…
More than 12
Another thunderstorm and some of those flashes are outshining the sun, or at least close, from 3 miles away.
I wish I was looking outside but we had one heck of a crack from like 2 seconds away.
Yeah, coupla days ago, almost 6ayem exactly, I got all woked up by a blindingly bright flash (even through blackout curtains) and just about 1sec later it’s like Earth exploded. Cats went flying, I’m all like “Wtaf?!?”, and then it hit that it was lightning/thunder practically right on the roof.
That the light woke me up through the drapes was pretty f’n impressive.
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Hmm maybe this is actually a good way to look at it, Wikipedia article on luminous efficacy lists a bunch of types of lighting… I wonder what the closest analogue is…?
If it’s some kind of gas discharge, that’s ~85lm/W or if it’s more similar to arc lamps, then ~50lm/W…