today it poured with rain - i took my camera messing about and took some cool shots using shutter speed of 1/4000! the rain suddenly looked like snow...
which got me wondering... is rain just single drops of water falling really quickly, but our eyes can only interpret it as long streaks of water, or does rain "really" fall as single drops of water?
Rain is drops of water.
In York today the sun was shining and it was really warm and then there was a sudden storm, then it hailstoned, until the sky cleared and the sun came back out.
The observed 'streaks' aren't all that long and are due to the persistence of vision in our sight mechanism: we see the drop where it is now and where it has been during the last fraction of a second. Without that factor cinema and television pictures would be seen indivdually as a series of still pictures.