Massive lightning thunderstorm in the desert. This is my very first Lightning image taken in 1988. This is a timed exposure and one shot. Fact: Most lightning strikes occur either at the beginning or end of a storm. The average lightning strike is six miles long. Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, fours times as hot as the sun's surface. A cloud-to-ground lightning channel can be 2 to 10 miles long. Voltage in a cloud-to-ground strike is 100 million to 1 billion volts.