Some various facts about lightning:
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Lightning can be often seen as white or white-yellow, although it can appear to have other colors depending on the background.
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The temperature of the air around a bolt of lightning is about 54,000ºF (30,000ºC), which is about six times hotter than the surface of the sun.
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Roy Sullivan was a park ranger who was hit by lightning seven times between 1942 and 1977.
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A person does not usually die from a lightning strike as long as the electrical energy does not go through their heart or spinal column. People who are given CPR immediately after being struck usually survive.
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Lightning can strike the same place more than once. The Empire State Building can be struck several times during the same storm (12 times in one recorded storm).
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The visible portion of a bolt of lightning can vary in length, usually ranging from 300 yards in mountainous areas, to 4 miles in flatlands. The average length is about 1 mile, but some as long as 20 miles have been recorded.
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The width of a lightning bolt is very narrow, around 1/2 inch. It is surrounded by a corona envelope, which is a glowing discharge which can be 10-20 feet in diameter.
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The speed of lightning can vary from 100 to 1,000 miles per second for the initial track and as much as 87,000 miles per second for the return (nearly half the speed of light).
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A stroke of lightning discharges from 10 to 100 million volts of electricity. The average strike has about 30,000 amperes.
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To roughly calculate the distance of a strike, count the number of seconds from the time it is seen until the time it is heard and then divide by five to get the distance in miles.
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When lightning strikes an area of dry sand, it forms a root-shaped solid chunk of silicon called a fulgurite.
Most of this information was
paraphrased from The Handy Science Answer Book.