Thunderstorm Sprite - 18th September 2023

[Rick]

One of my meteor cameras caught an example of this unusual form of lightning last night. There'd been a huge thunderstorm over us around midnight, but this is from a far more distant thunderstorm somewhere to the north. This is lightning that reaches up towards the ionosphere. To see it you need clear skies and a suitably distant thunderstorm. There have been some really spectacular examples posted to the meteor network groups recently, but this is the first one I've noticed on one of my cameras...


Gallery link

[Roberto]

This is really cool!

[MarkS]

Wow!  That's a great capture!

[Rick]

Some others on Mastodon, here: https://mastodon.scot/@markmac99/111090664594779042

[Carole]

Wow!!

[Rick]

What's interesting is just how brief the sprites are. I took a look at the FITS frames. The camera's running at 25 frames per second. There's one frame with a bright sprite image, and two following frames with faint traces, so the whole event was over and done in about a tenth of a second, with the brightest bit lasting less than 40 milliseconds. The catch, and the reason they weren't recorded until relatively recently, is that you need fairly particular conditions to see them, and they're nothing like as bright as tropospheric lightning. Meteor cameras are quite well suited to spotting them, as they're sensitive to faint events and aimed to look at the upper atmosphere...

[Rick]

Sprites are in season, it seems. Here's a recent APOD: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230918.html