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Enormous Red Sprites Seen From Space
astroengine writes: A gorgeous photo, captured from the International Space Station on the night of Aug. 10, 2015, shows an orbital view of thunderstorms over the city lights of southern Mexico as a recumbent Orion rises over Earth's limb. But wait, there's more: along the right edge of the picture a cluster of bright red and purple streamers can be seen rising above a blue-white flash of lightning: it's an enormous red sprite caught on camera! First photographed in 1989, red sprites are very brief flashes of optical activity that are associated with powerful lightning. So-called because of their elusive nature, sprites typically appear as branching red tendrils reaching up above the region of an exceptionally strong lightning flash. These electrical discharges can extend as high as 55 miles (90 kilometers) into the atmosphere, with the brightest region usually around altitudes of 40–45 miles (65–75 km). Sprites don't last very long — 3–10 milliseconds at most — and so to catch one (technically here it's a cluster of them) on camera is a real feat... or, in this case, a great surprise!
shoulda stopped that station and set the parking brake instead of taking picture with it moving
Run for the hills, the FSM has arrived and is hammering the world with his angry, red noodly appendages.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
The last time I dealt with sprites was programming eight-bit graphics on my Commodore 64.
Wondering if I'm the only one that was thinking it was some sort of prank, that somehow we could see, say, these guys from space?
Did you notice the awesome shot of our atmosphere in that photo, and how thin it looks.
Reminds of this visualisation.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes....
46137
We shall dazzle you with bright lights till you comply!
Obviously aliens.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Due to their ephemeral nature, sprites are hard to capture on camera.
For comparison, here's one that appeared over Paris this summer.
And the sprite looks like an atmospheric red jellyfish.
Is this proof that our reality is virtual?
Is this related to gamma ray bursts generated by strong lightning, also a recent observation?
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/uni...
sPh
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I, for one, welcome our space sprite overlords!
Look like they captured the photo using a fish eye lens camera from an high altitude spy plane.
It's not an illusion, it's an angel fart!
The best reason that I can imagine for this occuring, is that the clouds can act as a giant cathode screen. Inside of a vacuum tube, you have a lot of volts on an anode, and there's a nearby cathode that the electrons are attracted towards. But at the cathode, instead of just being a plate, there is a fine screen or mesh. Then the electrons try to hit the cathode, but some of them pass it and continue on in the direction they were accelerated in. in the case with clouds, several large charges are attracted upwards towards a charge sink, and a conductive plasma column (lightning) forms and carries most of the electrons into the sink, but some of the adjacent electrons miss or are too late, and are instead accelerated into the thinner upper atmosphere, and there they ionize oxygen and cause these ephemeral flashes.
Just an idea.