Upper atmospheric lightening sprites caught in 3D video
(PhysOrg.com) -- Sometimes in science, it’s easy to get caught up in the practical, to focus so heavily on the why’s and how’s of things, that it’s easy to miss the simple beauty that nature offers. That might be the case with a little known type of lightening that occurs between the part of the atmosphere where weather events are seen quite easily, and the far reaches near the beginning of space. Called sprites, these other kinds of lightening strikes are of far shorter duration than we’re accustomed to; it wasn’t until just the past thirty years or so that anyone even knew they existed. So odd were they, that pilots flying at high altitudes who saw them feared for their jobs if they spoke of them. Now however a research team has captured some instances of them using high speed cameras mounted on two jets to create 3D images.