NASA Spots 'Red Sprites' in Earth's Atmosphere from Space

A NASA astronaut has captured a strange glowing red light hanging in Earth's atmosphere from a window aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The stunning image was captured by NASA's Crew-8 mission commander, Matthew Dominick, on June 3, and shows a rapid flash of a weather phenomenon known as a "red sprite."

Red sprites are known to be found high above thunderclouds in a part of the upper atmosphere called the mesosphere (the coldest layer of the atmosphere) which is about 80 to 85 km above sea level.

The image showed bursts of blood-red energy glowing vertically off the coast of South Africa.

NASA hopes the image will encourage skywatchers on Earth to submit their own images of sprites and other transient luminous events (TLEs) to NASA's citizen science project, Spritacular, which will greatly help scientists understand these rare phenomena.

Dominic commented on the photo he posted on the X platform: “I was very lucky a few weeks ago when I captured continuous footage of a thunderstorm off the coast of South Africa.”

“One of the frames in the timelapse had a red structure,” Dominic continued. “If there are any red sprite experts out there, I’d appreciate advice on how to catch more of them. Obviously, you have to look for thunderstorms, but I think the stronger the storm, the better.”

Dominic took his image of the distinctive red sprites from a vantage point hundreds of miles above these electrical discharges, in orbit inside the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles above Earth's surface.

A NASA press release about the image explained that transient luminous events (TLE), including red sprites, are colorful bursts of energy that appear above storms as a result of lightning activity occurring inside and below storms on Earth.

The space agency noted that these and other fleeting bright events are most often captured on camera, usually while taking consecutive images of Earth with the help of a wide focal length lens.

It is worth noting that sprites, or stratospheric disturbances resulting from the electrification of severe thunderstorms, are created when electrical discharges from lightning are launched upward.

These discharges create long strands of plasma, or ionized gas, in the ionosphere, the ionized part of Earth's atmosphere that begins about 80 km (50 miles) above the Earth's surface, according to NASA.

Red sprites were officially discovered in the early 1990s when NASA's space shuttles captured the first clear images of the phenomenon. But studying red sprites has proven difficult because they are short-lived, so the exact mechanism behind the phenomenon remains unclear.