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This is probably what Superman would see if he looked at lighting with his X-ray vision.  This is the first captured X-ray image of lighting taken by the international Center for Lightning research and Testing (ICLRT) near Gainesville, Florida (July and August).

Using a custom-built camera the size of a refrigerator capable of snapping 10 million frames per second, Florida researchers have made the world’s first crude pictures of X-rays streaming from a stroke of lightning.

Florida researchers pointed the camera at a launch tower where they sent rockets soaring with trailing copper wire – a modern-day Ben Franklin experiment to trigger lightning.

“It’s been 250 years since Franklin’s kite experiment, and only within the last decade [eight years ago] we found that lightning emits X-rays,” said Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla.

The images are beyond blurry. They look like near-abstract blotches of white and green, better deciphered when displayed in a series with a rough sketch of the lightning tip superimposed.

“You can see the X-ray source descending,”  Dwyer, told a group of lightning specialists gathered Monday in San Francisco. “You start to see the air glow in X-rays.”

The fridge-sized X-ray lightning camera sits pointed at the rocket launch site where researchers try to trigger lightning

[Cheers livescience.com]