An astronomer in Slovakia captured the rare luminous phenomenon as it briefly flashed in Earth's upper atmosphere during a thunderstorm.
Eerie, ultra-detailed photo of a lightning 'sprite' exposes one of nature's least understood phenomena::An astronomer in Slovakia captured the rare luminous phenomenon as it briefly flashed in Earth's upper atmosphere during a thunderstorm.
We're so used to having the atmosphere just hang out and just be there for breathing.
Yeah, it turns out that molecules have other shit to do in this solar system, even if they're also being part of our atmosphere. They get charged up sometimes, from the sun's energy or just from moving around each other, and they do weird stuff like auroras or lightning sprites.
Here's a link to the three full-sized photos in case anyone else was annoyed that an article describing an ultra-detailed photo only included low-res thumbnails.
I did a school report on lightning 20(!) Years ago and included these. It's strange we seem to know little more about them other than having better photos now.