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A lightning bolt is about 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit - or five times hotter than the surface of the sun. When you hear thunder, you're hearing the shock wave that results when the air in and around the lightning bolt goes from about 70 degrees to 50,000 degrees in less than a second.

The average distance from one lightning strike to the next is two to three miles, but lightning can strike as far as 10 miles from the rain portion of the storm.

Lightning causes an average of 93 deaths and 300 injuries every year. Most lightning deaths and injuries occur when people are caught outdoors.

The intense heat of a strike can cause all the sap in a tree to boil instantaneously and evaporate. In a chimney, the violent expansion of the moisture in bricks can produce an explosion which blows the bricks into a million pieces.

Lightning moves about 30,000 times as fast as a bullet, and if a big stroke were to hit you, you'd never know it. But if you are like most people and have a slight touch of astraphobia (fear of lightning), you might get some consolation from the physicist's maxim: "If you see the flash, you know it's missed you" - it's all over bar the thunder, which is simply the sound effect of the explosion and occurs simultaneously with the flash.

44,000 lightning storms occur every day throughout the world. Lightning strikes the earth 6,000 times a minute. Since your last breath, lightning has struck the earth 100 times.

As many as 42 repeat strokes have been recorded as forming one discharge, giving lightning its flickering effect. What we are seeing is a number of different strokes, all taking slightly different paths.