a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astronauts photographed an eerie red light floating in Earth’s atmosphere from the window of their spacecraft. International Space Station (ISS).
Amazing images captured by NASA commander SpaceX On June 3, Matthew Dominick of the Crew 8 mission captured a flash of a weather phenomenon known as “red sprite” lightning.
Red sprites are known to occur high above thunderclouds in a part of the upper atmosphere called the mesosphere, which extends up to 33 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Images showed a glowing, vertical, blood-red burst of energy just off the coast. South Africa.
A surprising image captured this spring by Matthew Dominick, commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew 8 mission, captures the quick flash of a weather phenomenon known as a “red sprite.” Astronauts captured the eerie glow (above) from the International Space Station.
Last December, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen also captured this stunning photo (above) and time-lapse video of the Red Sprite.
NASA hopes that this fantastic image of the sprites will encourage skywatchers on Earth to send back photos of sprites and other celestial objects. [Transient Luminous Events or] TLE to NASA’s citizen science project “Spritacular.”
The US space agency hopes that the citizen-crowdsourced database, which will enter its third year of operation in October, will help scientists understand unusual phenomena.
“I got very lucky a few weeks ago when I shot a timelapse of a thunderstorm off the coast of South Africa,” Dominic explained of his photo in a post on social site X.
“A red spirit appeared in one of the frames of the time-lapse,” said Dominic, who served as a Navy test pilot and fighter pilot commander before joining NASA.
“If there are any red sprite experts out there, I would be grateful for some tips on how to catch more red sprites,” he added.
“Obviously, we need to be careful with thunderstorms, but the stronger the storm, the better.”
Astrophysicist Ph.D. Burg KosarHe serves as the principal investigator of spiritualsaid the project hopes to connect people who accidentally capture phenomena like red sprites with the scientists who study them.
“People take amazing images of fairies, but they are shared sporadically on the internet,” she noted, “and most of the scientific community is unaware of these images.”
“Spirituality will help fill that gap,” said Dr. Kosar, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Dominique took photos of the distinctive red sprites from a vantage point hundreds of miles above these high-altitude discharges while orbiting the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth’s surface.
Dominic took photos of the distinctive red sprites from hundreds of miles above these high-altitude discharges while in orbit from the International Space Station (above), 250 miles above Earth’s surface.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick (pictured above) served as a Navy test pilot and fighter pilot commander before joining the U.S. space program.
Red sprites are bursts of electrical light that occur in the atmosphere above highly active thunderstorms. (Above is an infographic from the European Space Agency on the occurrence of these spindles of red light.)
NASA’s press release about the new images further explains that “Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), including red sprites, are colorful bursts of energy that appear above storms as a result of lightning activity occurring within or beneath storms on Earth.”
The space agency noted that these and other TLEs are most often caught on camera by lucky coincidences, usually while taking time-lapse images of Earth using wide focal length lenses.
On the ISS, these time-lapse images are typically taken by scientific instruments mounted on the space station’s exterior, such as the Atmospheric-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM).
ASIM’s sensor suite will collect a wide range of data for scientific research on Earth, including cameras, photometers, and X-ray and gamma-ray detectors.
