Lightning storms in the Top End are unlike anywhere else in Australia. What makes them so frequent and dramatic?
Lightning in the Northern Territory's Top End has entranced humans for thousands of years, inspiring creation stories, terrifying locals, and attracting meteorologists and storm chasers from all over the globe.
This is what's going on behind the clouds.
A flicker followed by a gurgling rumble is the first sign the show is about to start.
During Darwin's wet season, it's an almost daily occurrence, but that doesn't stop the city's residents from emerging onto balconies to catch a glimpse at the performance.
From an 18th-floor vantage point, you can see the monstrous purple mass hovering out to sea.
Beneath it, a column of haze suggests heavy rain somewhere many kilometres from where you stand completely dry.
The temperature drops several degrees, a welcome relief from the sticky humidity.
For a millisecond, veins of light crackle across the horizon.
Then the thunder, so loud it seems like a train is roaring across an old metal bridge above your head.
Darwin — Australia's most remote capital city, closer to Jakarta than Canberra — was once thought to be the lightning capital of the world, in a time when the phenomenon was only counted if it was seen or heard.
It's now number 381 on the global list of lightning hotspots, far behind Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela — which according to data from the International Space Station, experiences more lightning than anywhere else in the world with an average of 389 flashes each day.
The below map, published by NASA's Earth Observatory, shows the regions with the highest concentration of lightning. The tiny white spot at the top of South America represents Lake Maracaibo, while the bright blotch on the east coast of Africa is Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, second on the list with an average of 368 flashes a day.
But like so many other things in life, sometimes it's about quality over quantity.
The Top End attracts storm chasers and meteorologists from all over the world, desperate to be there when a big bolt cracks open the sky.
Just one of these storms can produce thousands of bolts, each one many kilometres long, hotter than the surface of the sun and harbouring an electrical current of up to 30,000 amps.
And many locals and visitors agree: there's no better show on earth.
Chasing a front-row seat
There are few people more familiar with Top End thunderstorms than Mike O'Neill.
For the past two decades, the veteran storm chaser has been packing up his camera and hitting the road whenever there's a whiff of a storm within driving distance of his Palmerston home.
"You always say you're after the perfect shot. Well, I've got the perfect shot — but then you see another one," he says.
"There have been times where I've been burnt out, a storm's been in the area and my wife will go 'there's a storm out there', and I'll say 'ah, I don't care'.