Sprites

[deanm]

Nice capture:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-02/photographer-captures-rare-space-lightning/8486906
Dean

[MortonH]

Wow - very cool!

[paulhet]

AN amazing photo, but the ABC failed to mention that David also captured two galaxies in the shot - the Magellanic Clouds. Admittedly they aren't fleeting phenomena like meteors and sprites, but at least worth a mention...

[deanm]

Paul: the ABC wouldn't know about LMC & SMC unless these had been pointed out to them.
And the story was really focused elsewhere!
Dean

[billdan]

Have the scientists got a theory as to why they occur? The article says they are 195Km up from the ground and the biggest was 17Km long. So how can a thunderstorm with cloud peaks at 15Km cause static electricity to travel 195Km high off the ground.?

Just amazing.

[cometcatcher]

I used to video sprites with a frame integration video camera. Only B+W though. Would love to get some colour shots.

[sil]

Beautiful. I got to wondering once how many interesting things we lose in our astrophotography data. I shoot mainly dslr from tripod, several hundred shots at a time for one photo, I dont review each shot before I start processing. So of course fleeting phenomena get lost as part of my Integration step, so just in case I started to do a second integration using a maximum combine so I could see all the aircraft, satellites and shooting stars and things like a sprite or fireball should show up clearly for me to go back shot by shot and find the relevant subs. Nothing yet :( Just some interesting aircraft and satellite patterns but I think worth doing for that rare event that we might otherwise miss.