#red sprites

Ghost Sprites & Red Sprites... so rare. So beautiful, when captured.

Goodnight. ✌️

~beccawise7💜🖤

A truly incredible meteorological phenomenon. It always looked to me like something out of a cosmic horror story

“Ordinary lightning occurs when thundercloud particles collide, lose their electrons, and build up negative charge at the cloud bottom. The cloud’s negative charge repels negative charge deeper into the Earth, leaving Earth’s surface positively charged. The opposite charges attract, reaching towards each other and superheating the air into a white strike of plasma. Red sprites are millisecond events triggered by positive cloud-to-ground lightning. They extend up into the mesosphere where the air is too thin for thunder. Their red glow comes from heated molecular nitrogen. There are several potential causes for red sprites, including that the preceding positive lightning exposes the negatively charged cloud core to the positively charged upper atmosphere, allowing those charges to connect. NASA’s Juno has observed sprites on Jupiter, indicating that sprites occur on other planets!”

Red sprites are massive, faint flashes of red or orange light that appear high above powerful thunderstorms.

Red Sprites and a fireball over Arizona :: Paul M Smith l a stacked image; both occurring several seconds apart

* * * * *

"Loneliness is the feeling that one is not complete alone. What if it turns out nothing is missing at all? What if nothing changes when another person is near?"

Lightning goes down.

Everyone knows that.

But look again.

The strike you see hitting the ground is only half of the event.

Above the storm, another discharge moves in the opposite direction.

It rises.

Not as a single bolt, but as bursts of energy reaching into the upper atmosphere — far above where clouds end.

Most people never see it.

Because from the ground, it’s almost invisible.

But from above — from aircraft, high-speed cameras, or space — the structure becomes clear.

Every storm is a two-way system.

One flow goes down. The other escapes upward.

Same lightning.

Two directions.

We’ve just been looking from the wrong place.

🚨: Photographer captures absolutely rarest atmospheric phenomena EVER seen, red sprites!