This is incredible. I'd like to know what the physical process is here in terms of the colors and current paths. Is the red light a product of hydrogen gas disassociated from water vapor? Spectral phenomena of glow discharge?
> My first time-lapse. Thanks to some instruction and tips from @Astro_Ayers, I caught my first aurora. After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing. Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked. Thanks, Vapor!
> These are Star Trails taken from my previous mission to the ISS, Expedition 30, in 2012. I call it "Lightning Bugs."... In the photo, stars make arcing trails in deep space, while a huge thunderstorm pounds Earth below as seen from the time history of lightning flashes.
Oh yes, let's everyone stop posting links to twitter because someone disagrees with the political views of the owner. So much for having some tolerance right?
Please don't partake in virtue signalling. It makes you feel like you're making a difference, allows you to signal to your tribe that you feel a certain way (gaining you virtue among them), but requires 0 actual effort.
I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.
This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.
The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.
I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.
I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.
Sprites get their characteristic red color from excitation of nitrogen in
the low pressure environment of the upper mesosphere. At such low
pressures quenching by atomic oxygen is much faster than that of
nitrogen, allowing for nitrogen emissions to dominate despite no
difference in composition. As the atmospheric pressure increases in the
lower atmosphere, the red emissions are quenched and blue emissions from
atmospheric nitrogen excitation dominate. . .
The trouble with fancy photography (which National Geographic is famous for) is it can make things look far more spectacular or "otherworldly" than real life. Apparently this lightning can't usually be seen by people, occur above the clouds, and in the blink of an eye. You could be looking right at it and not notice anything otherworldly. Well that's not impressive. You can also see otherworldly things just by watching water move up close or looking at space through a telescope, or using an instrument to visualize EM fields or whatever. I expect those things to be otherworldly because they are.
For that matter I think a large part of what makes anything “otherworldly” is beauty in things unfolding outside our normal experience of the world: I don’t see what distinguishes glorious NG photography from the other methods. It’s only natural to expect that from techniques that let us access phenomena that wouldn’t be perceptible in terms of ordinary human scale or sense of time
Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.
> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.
Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.
No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.
Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?
Cool TLE photo from an astronaut couple days ago: https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563
The video of the sprite lightning in Tibet blew me away.
https://x.com/DarshanRajguru5/status/1940829392269463943
This is incredible. I'd like to know what the physical process is here in terms of the colors and current paths. Is the red light a product of hydrogen gas disassociated from water vapor? Spectral phenomena of glow discharge?
News story about that: https://petapixel.com/2025/06/02/rare-red-sprite-photographe...
Just, wow.
I've never seen anything like that.
Thank you for sharing it on HN!
We're spoiled in terms of cool astronauts! A couple of personal favorite posts:
1. Jonny Kim: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKkj52PuO6h/
> My first time-lapse. Thanks to some instruction and tips from @Astro_Ayers, I caught my first aurora. After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing. Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked. Thanks, Vapor!
———
2. Don Petit: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xbmhz4/i_captured_so...
> These are Star Trails taken from my previous mission to the ISS, Expedition 30, in 2012. I call it "Lightning Bugs."... In the photo, stars make arcing trails in deep space, while a huge thunderstorm pounds Earth below as seen from the time history of lightning flashes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250215124004/https://blogs.nas...
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Oh yes, let's everyone stop posting links to twitter because someone disagrees with the political views of the owner. So much for having some tolerance right?
please keep this kind of rhetoric to reddit
7 replies →
Please don't partake in virtue signalling. It makes you feel like you're making a difference, allows you to signal to your tribe that you feel a certain way (gaining you virtue among them), but requires 0 actual effort.
6 replies →
I expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.
This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.
The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.
I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.
My mother claims to have seen ball lightning. I was there too, but facing away from the window at the time. Sounded like regular lightning to me.
I asked her about this recently, but she doesn't remember.
I don't believe you.
1 reply →
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
Came up on my feed a few days ago. Looks like convincing ball lightning to me: https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o
It's likely an arcing powerline (see the reddit comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1lrk1rz/incredible_...
2 replies →
Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.
I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.
2 replies →
What’s odd about that video for me is, why didn’t the person zoom in (on the lightning ball)?
Seems like human nature would be to zoom in on something of interest.
2 replies →
The Doom plasma rifle and BFG no longer appear completely fictional.
The curious phenomena of red sprites, green ghosts and blue jets are clearly derived from the red, green and blue pixels of the simulation aether.
Nah, the aether doesn't care, we just see them that way because there's a bug preventing the effect from triggering all simulated retinal cones. :p
This article eventually links you to it, but what you probably want to look at is this: https://spritacular.org/gallery
(photos of these forms of lightning)
Really ought to give this a chance. This guy's photography is magnificent, and so full of sprites one might nearly get their fill:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGr-NlLTG8
Channel: NatureByJJ
Based in the Kimberley
The article links to a photographer of the phenomena which arguably has better info than the article.
https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites...
https://archive.is/7kAwt
The trouble with fancy photography (which National Geographic is famous for) is it can make things look far more spectacular or "otherworldly" than real life. Apparently this lightning can't usually be seen by people, occur above the clouds, and in the blink of an eye. You could be looking right at it and not notice anything otherworldly. Well that's not impressive. You can also see otherworldly things just by watching water move up close or looking at space through a telescope, or using an instrument to visualize EM fields or whatever. I expect those things to be otherworldly because they are.
I think it's ok to think they're all interesting
For that matter I think a large part of what makes anything “otherworldly” is beauty in things unfolding outside our normal experience of the world: I don’t see what distinguishes glorious NG photography from the other methods. It’s only natural to expect that from techniques that let us access phenomena that wouldn’t be perceptible in terms of ordinary human scale or sense of time
substantiate
NG forces people to enter email address without a close button.
Dev tools, pick element, set display:none. It’s your browser. You can choose what it does
I was able to close it
Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.
> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.
Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.
Is ball lightning even more mysterious?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#:~:text=Ball%...
No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.
Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-...
> Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.
There is this video which shows the shape on the left and spectral image on the right: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5
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Why is there a paywall article on the front of Hacker News?
From the FAQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
Reading mode in Firefox worked fine for me on this one.