Researchers call the bolts ” sprites”; they are red, fleeting, and tend to come in bunches. Note to sky watchers: Sprite season is underway. On May 19th, Laura Kranich photographed these specimens over Ziethen, Brandenburg, Germany:

“The sprites appeared over a mesoscale convective system that moved through northern Germany,” says Kranich. “I drove to eastern Germany to find a clear sky and to get a more distant view of the storm. (Distance can help see over the cloudtops.)”

Because sprites are associated with thunderstorms, they tend to occur in late spring and summer. Thunderstorm season is sprite season.

“Sprites are a true space weather phenomenon,” explains lightning scientist Oscar van der Velde of the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain. “They develop in mid-air around 80 km altitude, growing in both directions, first down, then up. This happens when a fierce lightning bolt draws lots of charge from a cloud near Earth’s surface. Electric fields [shoot] to the top of Earth’s atmosphere–and the result is a sprite. The entire process takes about 20 milliseconds.”

Although sprites have been seen for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until after 1989 when sprites were photographed by cameras onboard the space shuttle. Now “sprite chasers” routinely photograph sprites from their own homes. Give it a try!

Source: Spaceweather.com