Lightning lit up skies over southern Manitoba on Wednesday night. (Submitted by David Van Den Bossche)

If you were able to sleep through Wednesday night's thunderstorms, you missed quite a show: The night sky in Winnipeg was lit up by an incredible display of lightning that lasted into early Thursday.

Thunderstorms lit up the night skies across southern Manitoba but apparently caused little damage, though at least one residential garage was struck by lightning and burned. The lightning was widespread and continuous for several hours, sometimes lighting up the entire horizon.

Kumar Sharma, professor of physics at the University of Manitoba, said the Manitoba storm was more typical than the one that occurred in Brampton, Ont., where a mother and two small boys were struck by lightning Wednesday, apparently without warning.

Sharma said lightning materializes from the upper atmosphere, and people on the ground typically notice changes in temperature combined with high humidity.

"It [lightning] can move quite a distance horizontally before it finds a path to ground, and this is what is thought to be a mechanism for lightning strikes far away from storms," Sharma said. "Even on very sunny kind of conditions this can happen. And it's thought to be much more intense than the other, more normal kind of lightning, which takes place between the clouds and the ground."

Sharma said during a thunderstorm the best thing to do is stay indoors.

More thunderstorms are in Winnipeg's Thursday evening forecast.