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The most otherworldly, mysterious forms of lightning on Earth
- pbarry25 1y agohttps://archive.is/7kAwt https://archive.is/7kAwt
- nla 1y agoWhy is there a paywall article on the front of Hacker News?
- thunderbong 1y agoFrom the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
- Nursie 1y agoReading mode in Firefox worked fine for me on this one.
- the_arun 1y agoNG forces people to enter email address without a close button.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- mock-possum 1y ago> 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.
- neom 1y agoCool TLE photo from an astronaut couple days ago: https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563 https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563
- cs702 1y agoJust, wow. I've never seen anything like that. Thank you for sharing it on HN!
- lbeckman314 1y agoWe're spoiled in terms of cool astronauts! A couple of personal favorite posts: 1. Jonny Kim: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKkj52PuO6h/ 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_something_most_astrophotographers_can/ 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.nasa.gov/letters/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250215124004/https://blogs.nas...
- Synaesthesia 1y agoThe video of the sprite lightning in Tibet blew me away. https://x.com/DarshanRajguru5/status/1940829392269463943 https://x.com/DarshanRajguru5/status/1940829392269463943
- r721 1y agoNews story about that: https://petapixel.com/2025/06/02/rare-red-sprite-photographed-in-tibet-dazzles-social-media/ https://petapixel.com/2025/06/02/rare-red-sprite-photographe...
- foxglacier 1y agoThe 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.
- dfedbeef 1y agoI think it's ok to think they're all interesting
- alwa 1y agoFor 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
- foxglacier 1y agoMy cynicism of NG photography is that you can't go look at the thing yourself and see it the way they show. The pictures are effectively faked though fancy camera tricks. Yea it's fascinating to see beyond our usual senses, but it's also obvious that those things are going to be strange and otherworldly so it doesn't even need to be said. Truly amazing otherworldliness would be something you can (in principle) stand there and ogle with your own senses.
- ujkiolp 1y agosubstantiate
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adolph 1y agoThe article links to a photographer of the phenomena which arguably has better info than the article. https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites-blue-jets-and-other-transient-luminous-events https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites... 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. . .
- chias 1y agoThis article eventually links you to it, but what you probably want to look at is this: https://spritacular.org/gallery https://spritacular.org/gallery (photos of these forms of lightning)
- jacobevelyn 1y agoI expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
- JKCalhoun 1y agoCame up on my feed a few days ago. Looks like convincing ball lightning to me: https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o
- alberth 1y agoWhat’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.
- omnibrain 1y agoJust 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.
- hermitcrab 1y ago>I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now The prevalence of phone cameras in the modern world has shown that: -Bigfoot doesn't exist. -Police brutality does.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoNo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-ball-video-july/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-...
- MisterTea 1y ago> 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 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neuroelectron 1y agoThe curious phenomena of red sprites, green ghosts and blue jets are clearly derived from the red, green and blue pixels of the simulation aether.
- Terr_ 1y agoNah, 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
- eth0up 1y agoReally 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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGr-NlLTG8 Channel: NatureByJJ Based in the Kimberley
- chasil 1y agoIs ball lightning even more mysterious? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#:~:text=Ball%20lightning%20is%20a%20rare%20and%20unexplained,from%20pea%2Dsized%20to%20several%20meters%20in%20diameter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#:~:text=Ball%...
- sweesama 1y ago[dead]
- HK-NC 1y agoIve 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.