Category: Sprites And Jets - Ascension Now

ISS CAPTURES A 'GIGANTIC JET' LIGHTNING BOLT:

26/2/2025

Most bolts of lightning go down toward the Earth. But, sometimes, they go in the other direction, too. On Nov. 19, 2024, astronauts onboard the ISS watched a Gigantic Jet rocket up from the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America):

Puerto Rican sprite chaser Frankie Lucena noticed the rare bolt while he was browsing NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. "I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event, and found that there were 4 photos in all," says Lucena. "I've animated them here."
Sometimes called "Earth's tallest lightning," because they reach the ionosphere more than 50 miles high, Gigantic Jets were discovered near Taiwan and Puerto Rico in 2001-2002. Since then, only dozens have been photographed. They seem to love storms over water and are famous for surprising passengers onboard commercial aircraft.
The nature of gigantic jets and their possible association with other types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) such as blue jets and red sprites remains an active topic of research.
https://spaceweather.com/

GREEN GHOSTS IN A GEOMAGNETIC STORM:

3/7/2024

This picture may be the first of its kind. On June 27th, photographer Tom Warner of South Dakota caught a bunch of Green Ghosts in a geomagnetic storm:

"This was a huge bucket list item for me," says Warner. "An MCS thunderstorm was moving through the area, so I set up my camera to photograph sprites. The auroras and the Green Ghosts were NOT expected!"
Everyone knows what auroras are. Green Ghosts are still new to many observers. They're the green blobs on top of the red sprites. Experienced observers say they appear in as few as 0.2% of sprite photos.
"Tom Warner's green ghost is very clear--and certainly an unusual sight combined with aurora!" says Oscar van der Velde, an upper atmospheric lightning researcher at the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya.

Green Ghosts were discovered in May 2019 by Hank Schyma, a Houston Texas-based storm chaser. Initially, researchers thought they might be a form of green airglow activated by sprites when they touched a layer of oxygen 80 to 90 km above Earth's surface. Indeed, Ghost is an acronym: "Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Tops."
New research casts doubt on that explanation. A paper recently published in Nature Communications reports a Herculean effort to decode the color of Green Ghosts. About a month after Schyma discovered the phenomenon, a team of lightning scientists led by María Passas Varo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía began chasing thunderstorms, hoping to catch a Green Ghost in the slit of their spectrograph. It wasn't easy. Green Ghosts appear unpredictably and often last for no more than a fraction of a second. Four years and 2000 spectra later, they managed to capture just one spectrum of a Green Ghost strong enough to study. The results surprised them.
Green Ghosts, it seems, are made of metal.

Spectrum of a Green Ghost over the Mediterranean in Sept. 2019.
[full caption] [source]

"We identified a mix of spectral lines, including mainly iron, nickel, oxygen and nitrogen, that when combined, produced a green-yellow glow," says van der Velde, a co-author of the study. "There were also traces of sodium and silicon."
This metal-rich stew is more like meteor debris than airglow. Iron atoms deposited by meteors burning up in Earth's atmosphere peak in abundance 85 km high--about right for the tops of the tallest sprites. Green Ghosts might thus be a type of "meteor fluorescence."
Or not. These conclusions are based on just one spectrum, and Green Ghosts may be far more varied than that. Stay tuned for updates as the research continues.
https://spaceweather.com/

AN ELVE OVER ITALY:

1/4/2023

For a few milliseconds last Monday night, March 27th, an enormous red ring of light appeared in the sky over central Italy. Valter Binotto photographed it from the small town of Possagno in the foothills of the Italian Alps:

This is an "ELVE"--short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. It's a rare species of sprite discovered in 1990 by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Binotto may have just taken the best ever picture of one from the ground.
"The ELVE was generated by intense lightning in a storm near Ancona about 285 km south of me," says Binotto. One bolt was so strong, it generated an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth's ionosphere. Normal lightning bolts carry 10 to 30 kilo-ampères of current; this bolt was about 10 times stronger than normal.
Binotto created a graphic showing the scale of the ELVE:

"It was about 100 km high and nearly 360 km wide," says Binotto. "I have been photographing upper atmospheric lightning and transient luminous events (TLEs) since 2019, hundreds of them, and this is one of the biggest structures I have ever seen."
ELVE season is just getting started in Europe and North America, where spring and summer thunderstorms will multiply in the months ahead. Photographers should be alert for red rings and many other things above the cloudtops. Look here.
https://spaceweather.com/

A Gigantic Jet with Fireballs

29/10/2021

September 26, 2021 / Dr.Tony Phillips - NASA

Sept. 24, 2021: Lightning on Earth is getting weirder and weirder. On the evening of Sept. 20th, Puerto Rican photographer Frankie Lucena pointed his Sony A7s camera at an offshore electrical storm. This is what he saw:

“This Gigantic Jet plasma event occurred over a very powerful thunderstorm near the Virgin Islands just ahead of Tropical Storm Peter,” says Lucena. “I can’t believe I was able to capture such amazing details.”

Indeed, this is one of the best-ever photos of a Gigantic Jet. Sometimes called “Earth’s tallest lightning” because they reach the ionosphere more than 50 miles high, the towering forms were discovered near Taiwan and Puerto Rico in 2001-2002. Since then, only dozens of Gigantic Jets have been photographed. They seem to love storms over water and are famous for surprising passengers onboard commercial aircraft.

In 2017 and 2018, lightning researcher Oscar van der Velde of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya set up high speed cameras on the northern coast of Colombia in a dedicated campaign to capture Gigantic Jets. In three months of observing time he managed to capture only 12. That’s how elusive they are.

Above: The red arrow points from Lucena’s camera to the offshore electrical storm.

“Frankie has photographed a rare Gigantic Jet with ‘carrot’ morphology, first reported by Su et al (2003),” notes van der Velde. “The other, more common type of jet has a ‘tree’ morphology.” Here is a comparison: trees vs. carrots.

“Carrot jets” are remarkable for their internal beads–that is, bright balls of light hundreds of meters wide. Lucena caught dozens of them illuminating the jet’s midsection. They might be places where streamers inside the jet are intersecting, or regions of enhanced heating.

“We don’t know,” says van der Velde. “Gigantic Jets are not easily placed in front of a spectrograph.”

Meanwhile, Lucena is still marveling at what happened. “This is the brightest Gigantic Jet I have ever seen. It was truly remarkable.”

https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2021/09/26/a-gigantic-jet-with-fireballs/

SPRITE SEASON BEGINS:

8/4/2021

Spring is the season for sprites, and Paul Smith just photographed a magnificent display over Kansas. "These were my first big sprites of the season," says Smith, who took this picture on April 6th:

"They were so bright, I saw a couple of them with my unaided eyes," he adds.Sprites are a weird form of lightning that leap up from powerful thunderstorms. The ones Smith saw are "jellyfish sprites", named for their resemblance to sea creatures. Their red tentacles stretch about 90 km high, almost touching the edge of space. Other forms exist, too.
At this time of year, severe storms set the stage for sprite formation. Mesoscale convective systems sweep across the Great Plains, cracking with intense electric fields that drive electrons up and into sprites. La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean may amplify this process.
Although the sprites were in Kansas, Smith saw them from Oklahoma. This weather satellite image shows the observing geometry.

"I was about 200 miles away from the thunderstorm," says Smith. Turns out, that's about the right distance. You have to be far away to see sprites over the top of the thunderclouds.
Although sprites have been reported by pilots and storm chasers for more than a century, many scientists were skeptical. Can you blame them? "Doctor, I just saw a giant red jellyfish in the sky!" A turning point came in 1989 when sprites were photographed by researchers at the University of Minnesota and cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now sprites are in the mainstream. See for yourself.
www.spaceweather.com

Recently discovered electrical phenomenon 'Green Ghost' captured over West Texas

2/6/2020

Spaceweather.com; 01 Jun 2020

Above: From the archives of Thomas Ashcraft, a Green Ghost photographed in 2014.
“At the time I did not realize what I had captured,” he says.

Want to discover something new? Keep an eye on the tops of thunderstorms. Sprites, trolls, elves and pixies: These are just a handful of the exotic phenomena that have surprised researchers monitoring cloudtops since the 1980s. In fact, a new one has just been discovered. Introducing, the Green Ghost.

Thomas Ashcraft caught one over New Mexico on May 25th. Play his movie, and look for the green afterglow following the flash of this magnificent jellyfish sprite:

Green GHOST From A Jellyfish Sprite May 25 2020 035519.5162 UTC Texas from Thomas Ashcraft on Vimeo.

"In the past week I've captured two Green Ghosts over west Texas that were generated by strong peak current lightning strokes," says Ashcraft. "The one on May 25th registered 118 kAmperes on the National Lightning Detection Network and saturated VLF lightning sensors as far away as Great Britain and Germany."

"As far as I know there are no scientific journal articles regarding this new phenomenon and a handful of citizen scientists are leading the way," says Ashcraft.

Green Ghosts were discovered only 1 year ago by Hank Schyma, a Houston Texas-based storm chaser better known to his fans as Pecos Hank. "It was May 25, 2019," recalls Schyma. "I video-recorded some sprites over a storm in Oklahoma. Later, when I reviewed the footage, I noticed a mysterious green afterglow above some of the larger sprites."

Schyma worked closely with another storm chaser, Paul M. Smith. "We shared the footage with scientists and others on social media. Nobody had heard of it before. Many argued it might be a camera sensor artifact. Over the following weeks and months, Paul captured multiple other ghosts at high resolution, silencing the skepticism."

At the moment, no one knows for sure what causes Green Ghosts. Their color may be a clue. Green is commonly seen in auroras and airglow, two upper atmospheric phenomena that get their verdant hue from excited atoms of oxygen. The same could hold true for Green Ghosts. When the tops of strong sprites hit the airglow layer 96-97 km above Earth's surface, oxygen atoms might briefly glow green.

Right or wrong, this hypothesis inspired the name Ghost. "It is an acronym for Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Tops," explains Schyma. "More importantly, we named them ghosts to maintain the theme of other transient luminous events such as sprites, trolls, elves and pixies."

In the USA, sprite season is just getting underway as summer approaches, bringing severe electrical storms. Stay tuned for more ghost stories.

RED SPRITES IN HIGH DEFINITION:

15/8/2019

According to NASA, cosmic rays are intensifying. Last week, on Aug. 6th, Roger Spinner of Montsevelier, Switzerland, witnessed a likely side-effect. "Jellyfish sprites were leaping above a thunderstorm in northern Italy about 215 km away," says Spinner. "I recorded an HD video of the display using my Sony A7s." Here is a single frame:

As the storm raged over Italy's Lombardy region, Spinner's camera recorded three magnificent clusters of red sprites in rare detail.

"For me, personally, these shots are special," says Spinner, who has been monitoring sprites in Europe for more than 7 years. "Although three jellyfish sprites in one evening is nothing unusual for a strong thunderstorm, color videos of sprites in HD or 4K quality haven't been possible for very long. The Sony A7s came on the market only a few years ago."

Cosmic rays may be helping Spinner capture such images. The rays are intensifying because of Solar Minimum. During this phase of the solar cycle, radiation from deep space penetrates the sun's weakening magnetic defenses and enters Earth's atmosphere more than usual. Some researchers believe that cosmic rays provide the ionizing "spark" that triggers sprites.

Spinner knows where to point his cameras thanks, in part, to live lightning maps published by Blitzortung.org. Mesoscale convective systems with strong lightning tend to produce sprites as well. It helps to be at least a hundred kilometers away from a storm in order to see over the top of the thunderhead. "Even if you know exactly where the thunderstorms are and where the sprites might occur, however, it is always a surprise what kind of spectacle nature actually offers you," says Spinner.
www.spaceweather.com

GIANT PALM TREE SPRITE:

21/6/2019

Last night in Texas, a flurry of red sprites exploded from the top of a powerful thunderstorm. One of the the red forms was so tall and bright, it was witnessed by naked-eye observers 200 miles away in Oklahoma. "My boys and I saw it with our unaided eyes," marvels Paul Smith, who photographed the event from the shores of Lake Thunderbird, OK. This may be the first time that a sprite's reflection has been captured in water:

Naked-eye sightings of sprites are rare, mainly because they are so fleeting. But this one left an impression. "My eleven-year-old son Thomas described it as a 'huge orange-y-brown flash of lines high in the sky,'" says Smith. "My seven-year-old James just exclaimed 'what the heck was that?'"
At first glance, Smith's capture resembles a Gigantic Jet--that is, a type of "sprite on steroids." But lightning expert Oscar van der Velde of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya thinks it may be something else, equally exotic.
"In early days of sprite research, they were called 'palm trees' by researchers from the University of Alaska," van der Velde explains. "It is, basically, a bushy group of red sprites on top, with a secondary purple discharge hanging below. These types of events are quite rare. You need a big, active mesoscale convective system to produce them."

Palm tree sprites are a topic of cutting edge research. "We haven't even been able to confirm that they indeed originate from the thundercloud," says van der Velde.
"Last night was so much fun," adds Smith. "In addition to the sprites, my son Thomas photographed Jupiter and our Moon with the Nikon coolpix 80x zoom camera. We also saw a nice bolide exploding over the storms. The kid's reactions were priceless."
www.spaceweather.com

NAKED EYE SPRITE STORMS:

1/5/2019

Have you ever seen a sprite? Some say it's impossible. The strange and fleeting forms of red lightning materialize above thunderheads, then disappear again in less time than it takes to blink. Yet this week veteran sprite chaser Paul Smith says he did see them: "I've watched a number with my bare eyes over the last two big storms in Kansas."

Above: Naked-eye sprites over Kansas on April 28th. Credit: Paul Smith.

"It has been an amazing experience that, quite honestly, has left me somewhat emotional," says Smith. "I am now convinced that before the days of light pollution, these were observed more often than we know."
Sprites are an exotic form of electricity that leap up from storm clouds instead of down like ordinary lightning. Although sprites have been reported for at least a century, many scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were accidentally photographed by researchers from the University of Minnesota and confirmed by video cameras onboard the space shuttle.
Smith has been chasing and photographing sprites for years in the stormy Great Plains around Oklahoma and Kansas. "This is the first time I have seen them with my unaided eyes," he says. "I believe that these were unusually bright." Here are two examples of clusters he caught simultaneously with his eyes and camera.

His eyes registered fewer details than his camera--but he still saw plenty. "The jellyfish shapes I saw had a fiery orange/red color," he adds. "I didn't see the bottoms of the tendrils, but I had an impression of the heads and beads. Storm chasers to the west of me were also viewing with their naked eyes."
The underlying physics of sprites is still not fully understood. Some models hold that cosmic rays help them get started by creating conductive paths in the atmosphere. If cosmic rays do indeed spark sprites, now is a good time to look for them because cosmic rays are nearing a Space Age high.
More examples of naked-eye sprites may be found on Smith's Facebook page.
www.spaceweather.com

GIANT 'ELVE' OVER RUSSIA:

19/8/2018

On Aug. 16th, high above a thunderstorm in central Russia, an enormous ring of light appeared in the night sky. Using a low-light video camera in the town of Irbit, amateur astronomer Ilya Jankowsky photographed the 300 km-wide donut hovering near the edge of space:

"It appeared for just a split second, surrounding the horns of Taurus," says Jankowsky.

This is an example of an ELVE (Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources). First seen by cameras on the space shuttle in 1990, ELVEs appear when a pulse of electromagnetic radiation from cloud-to-ground lightning propagates up toward space and hits the base of Earth's ionosphere. A faint ring of deep-red light marks the broad 'spot' where the EMP hits.

"For this to happen, the lightning needs to be very strong--typically 150-350 kilo-Ampères," says Oscar van der Velde, a member of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "For comparison, normal cloud-to-ground flashes only reach 10-30 kA."

ELVEs often appear alongside red sprites, which are also sparked by strong lightning. Indeed, Jankowsky's camera caught at least two clusters of sprites dancing nearby.

ELVEs are elusive--and that's an understatement. Blinking in and out of existence in only a millisecond, they are completely invisible to the human eye. For comparison, red sprites tend to last for hundredths of a second and regular lightning can scintillate for a second or more. Their brevity explains why ELVEs are a more recent discovery than other lightning-related phenomenon. Learn more about the history and physics of ELVEs here and here.
www.spaceweather.com

RARE WINTER SPRITES:

3/12/2017

Red sprites tend to be a summertime phenomenon. They shoot up from the tops of intense thunderstorms, reaching toward the edge of space, while their cousins, normal lightning bolts, lance down to the ground below. Summer is the season for sprites. So it came as a surprise, on the night of Dec. 2nd, when Martin Popek photographed a phalanx of winter sprites leaping above the snowy landscape of the Czech republic:

"This is a very rare thing," says Popek. "I've been monitoring sprites from my private observatory since 2011. This is only the second storm with red sprites I have ever seen in December."
Sprites are a true space weather phenomenon. Some researchers believe they are linked to cosmic rays: subatomic particles from deep space striking the top of Earth's atmosphere produce secondary electrons that, in turn, provide the spark that triggers sprites. If this is true, then sprites could multiply in the years ahead as cosmic rays intensify due to the decline of the solar cycle. Indeed, increasing levels of cosmic rays might explain by the strange red forms are spilling over into the "off-season."
Although sprites have been seen for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were photographed by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now "sprite chasers" routinely photograph sprites from their own homes. "I used up a Watec 910HX security camera with UFOCapture software to catch my sprites," says Popek. Give it a try!
diagram: How to Look for Sprites
www.spaceweather.com

SPRITES AND COSMIC RAYS:

23/7/2017

Last night, cameras in Czechia recorded a magnificent display of sprites leaping up from a thunderstorm in neighboring Austria. Photographer Martin Popek of Nýdek, Czechia, selected this specimen from many frames he recorded:

"The storm was about 390km away," says Popek, "and the sprite was huge. It stretched 50 km to 90 km above the ground below."Sometimes called "space lightning," sprites are a true space weather phenomenon. They inhabit the upper atmosphere alongside auroras, meteors and noctilucent clouds. Some researchers believe they are linked to cosmic rays: subatomic particles from deep space striking the top of Earth's atmosphere produce secondary electrons that, in turn, could provide the spark that triggers sprites.

The link to cosmic rays is particularly interesting at this time. Despite a brief reduction in cosmic rays last week caused by the sweeping action of a passing CME, cosmic rays are intensifying. For the past two years, space weather balloons have observed a steady increase in deep space radiation penetrating our atmosphere. This increase is largely due to the decline in the solar cycle. Flagging solar wind pressure and weakening sunspot magnetic fields allow more cosmic rays into the inner solar system--a trend which is expected to continue for years to come. [higher vibrational light/energy penetrating our solar system and Earth. MS] These changes could add up to more sprites.

Although sprites have been seen for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were photographed by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now "sprite chasers" routinely photograph sprites from their own homes. "I used up a Watec 910HX security camera with UFOCapture software to catch my sprites," says Popek.

A GIGANTIC JET OVER CHINA:

12/7/2017

Think of them as sprites on steroids: Gigantic Jets are lightning-like discharges that spring from the tops of thunderstorms, reaching all the way to the ionosphere some 80 km overhead. They're enormous and powerful. On July 4th, an all-sky camera in the Guangdong Meteor Observation Network detected this specimen over southern China:

"We have detected sprites before, but never a Gigantic Jet. It was fantastic," says Lyrics Shum, an astronomer who works with the Network. "According to our calculations, it stretched from an altitude of 15 km at the bottom to more than 87 km on top, and it lasted 0.32 seconds." The instigating storm was located offshore over the South China Sea.

"Gigantic Jets are much more rare than sprites," says Oscar van der Velde, a member of the Lightning Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. "While sprites were discovered in 1989 and have since been photographed by the thousands, it was not until 2001-2002 that Gigantic Jets were first recorded from Puerto Rico and Taiwan." Only a few dozen Gigantic Jets have ever been seen, mostly over open ocean.

Amateur astronomers, you can contribute to Gigantic Jet research. Check your local weather radar map for storms just over the horizon, point your meteor cameras in that direction, and click. Gigantic Jets might not be as rare as we think.
www.spaceweather.com

RED SPRITES OVER EUROPE:

4/6/2017

High above thunderstorms in Europe, red sprites are dancing across the cloudtops. Martin Popek of Nýdek, Czech republic, photographed these specimens on June 1st:

"The transient forms were shooting up from a storm in Slovenia," says Popek.

Reaching up to the edge of space, sprites are a true space weather phenomenon. Some researchers believe they are linked to cosmic rays: subatomic particles from deep space striking the top of Earth's atmosphere produce secondary electrons that, in turn, provide the spark that triggers sprites. If this is true, then sprites could multiply in the years ahead as cosmic rays intensify due to the decline of the solar cycle.

Although sprites have been seen for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were photographed by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now "sprite chasers" routinely photograph sprites from their own homes. "I used up a Watec 910HX security camera with UFOCapture software to catch my sprites," says Popek.
Give it a try! diagram: How to Look for Sprites

Photographer captures a 'rare' weather phenomenon as storm creates a violet flash upwards in Western Australia

6/4/2017

Amie Gordon : Daily Mail, UK : 05 Apr 2017

© Jeff Miles
These stunning photos show the violet stream shooting out from the top of a cloud.

A photographer couldn't believe his luck when he captured a rare celestial phenomenon creating a breathtaking vision against the night sky. Photographs taken in Australia depict the colourful violet stream shooting out against the deep blue of a night sky behind, while the raging storm lights up the clouds below.

The phenomenon, called ionospheric lightning, occurs at much higher altitudes than normal lightening or storm clouds. Photographer Jeff Miles captured the rare sight near the small town of Pilbara in Western Australia.

© Jeff Miles
Upper atmospheric lightning, or ionospheric lightning, are terms used by experts to refer to a family of short-lived electrical-breakdown phenomena that occur above the altitudes of normal lightning and storm clouds.

He said: 'This was a mind blowing experience to see with my eyes, never mind research the photos to find out just how rare they are. 'Gigantic jets have only been captured on camera a handful of times and this night I was lucky enough to see six jets.'