A storm-chaser and photographer recently documented a fascinating natural event known as a “sprite” in stunning detail.
He uploaded it onto his YouTube page, and now a viewer can see lighting bolts express themselves in a completely different way, while also learning how to photograph them.
A phenomenon that might have been more commonly seen by our ancestors, a sprite, as Michael from science out there describes, is a moment of extremely powerful lighting between the ground and the edge of space.
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In his video, entitled ‘Bright Red Jellyfish Sprites’, Michael shares with his audience the images he captured of what look to be red water droplets running down a window, or a few jellyfish, or even ramen noodles, suspended for only an instant in the Colorado sky.
To capture a sprite, says Michael, one has to be in a place where there is both very low light pollution, and a view out towards, above, and beyond, the “anvil” of a powerful storm.
If someone finds themselves in this very fortunate situation and focuses their gaze, not below where white and blue lighting illuminates the clouds, but on the night sky above, they might see a flash of an image that looks like something out of the movie Independence Day, or other Sci-Fi classics.
“Usually sprites are quite dim, and few of them are visible to the eye, but to see them in spite of the glow of twilight meant something extraordinary must be going on,” Michael recounts in his video.
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“Seeing them and photographing them perfectly blends my interests in astrophotography and storm-chasing,” he explains.
(WATCH the ‘Bright Jellyfish Red Sprites’ burst into life below.)
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