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Mysterious Sprite Photographed By ISS Astronaut
astroengine writes "A very rare and beautiful view of a red sprite has been photographed by Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) hovering just above a bright flash of lightning in a thunderstorm over Myanmar. First documented in a photo in 1989, red sprites are very brief flashes of optical activity that are associated with powerful lightning discharges in storms — although the exact mechanisms that create them aren't yet known. But the orbiting outpost seems like the perfect vantage point to learn more about them!"
So now we're living in that episode of Star Trek Voyager?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Mysterious, photographed by ISS and no mention of aliens. I am disappoint.
Yeah, I was sort of disappointed because the photo in the article wasn't sharp enough for me to resolve the pixel edges.
he's coming
I watched the video, but could not find the still from TFA in it. At what point does the sprite happen?
The red lectroids are coming, the red lectroids are coming!
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It's just a palette swap from a blue sprite. Try attacking it with ice or water attacks.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
A very rare and beautiful view of a red sprite has been photographed by Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) hovering just above a bright flash of lightning in a thunderstorm over Myanmar.
You see, this is the kind of poor journalism that gets me upset: The International Space Station somehow manages to come to a complete stop in its orbit and hover -- or somehow move out to the Clarke Belt, and stay geosynchronous -- and what does the reporter think is newsworthy? The pretty photograph it took while it was there.
That's where Top Gun was filmed, right?
Came expecting aliens.... left disappointed....
Ah those were the days - when the graphics chips moved objects around the screen called sprites, and you could do fancy things with copper lists...
Going even further back, there was the Austin-Healy Sprite, a traditional British sportscar
And back more on topic - Why do Astronauts drink Sprite? Because they can't get 7-Up
The video on the link of Saturn's aurora includes some lovely animation.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I can almost taste it's tingling tartness!
Wow, that looks extremely similar to the red light created by the Starfish Prime thermonuclear bomb detonation in space! In that case, it was fast electrons from the nuclear explosion, spiralling along magnetic field lines and eventually colliding with oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, which emit a red glow when excited.
I'm going to guess that this is a picture of oxygen being excited by runaway electrons produced by lightning. Cool!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
nt
It looks a lot like flare + chromatic aberration to me.
But if it has been seen & reported before, then it might be worth investigating it.
That looks like it might be excited hydrogen.
Much more cost effective and much better coverage would be obtained by a fleet of microsatellites with cameras and special software to identify and photograph such events.
That Cupola dome on the ISS has been worth every penny put into it. The sheer volume of photo and video being transmitted back from the station and into the public domain is staggering.
And as this incident reveals, these photographs serve as an important observational record too.
In fact, it's rather disappointing that we have so few satellites capable of simply taking pictures of the earth(excepting spy satellites which take pictures of only very small parts of it). It might seem frivolous, but the reality is that we really don't know what phenomena or new perspectives we are likely to see from space. To say nothing of the public and educational outreach afforded by such images.
Would it really cost so much to send up small satellites with embedded cameras? Couldn't we do without one or two bank CEOs in return for high def pictures of our planet?
May the Maths Be with you!
Did it have prominently mounted headlights?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I prefer my lightning phenomena in 3-d. This is the Warcraft 2 of space.
ketchup fingers.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There are a couple misleading things in that summary. It's actually not really a "lightning flash" it's an electrical discharge that heads way the hell up into the atmosphere instead of touching the ground. They're like 10x taller than a lightning strike to the ground too (50 miles approx)
This is less of a one in a million shot than they make it sound, as there's a lot more light emitted so it sort of bounces around for a lot longer than normal lightning. By the looks of the light spread in that photo, he actually missed the discharge itself and that's just the resulting glow. You can find some really, really good shots of what one actually looks like using google image search.
I thought the whole video was interesting. It was especially cool to see synchronization of some of the lightning flashes over long distances. At around 24sec, you can see multiple lightning flashes that occur simultaneously even though it appears they are spaced many miles apart. I didn't know lightning was linked over such great distances.
For thoses who are watching the video. It is at the 6 sec mark in the middle right. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/myanmar_iss_20120430/myanmar_iss_20120430HD_web.mov
It's very obviously this viewed from a different angle:
duh?!?!!!!
It's probably one of the tens of thousands of alien vessels monitoring our world. Every once in a while a lightning storm overloads their cloaking equipment and we see it as a bright flash. I'm sure the captain of the Myanmar surveillance contingent will be properly disciplined and reduced in rank for allow one of his ships to be seen even indirectly by the subjects under observation.
Luckily no one will believe the real truth thanks to a long running public disinformation campaign designed to discredit all claims of alien interaction. Roswell was the first major mishap (stupid joyriding teenagers). Area 51 doesn't actually contain anything, the ship itself was towed and the kids sent for reprogramming, but the distraction was necessary.
Anyway, carry on, your theories are amusing to us.
Id be willing to bet that the red sprite is from charged particles hitting the ionosphere, creating an aurora from the inside.
And I though we had until Dec 2012...
But... the future refused to change.
Ready the SD platforms...