As the weather has been terrible here with rain and thunder storms, last night as the lightning flashed in the distance, I noticed the sky above was clear and, being desperate to do some imaging, I got out the Redcat and the CEM60 and started taking subs of my latest target (risky I know but desperate times.....
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I then thought it might be cool to setup my Sony A7III and Samyang 20mm f1.8 lens to capture a time lapse, 10 sec exposures at ISO 10,000.
Today, after making the time lapse, my wife asked me to select one of the images that showed a nice lightning flash. As I scrolled through each image, to my surprise, I found four images with tendrils of red high up in the clear sky above lightning flashes and realised I had captured Sprites. These two images were the clearest.
"Sprites or
red sprites are large-scale electric discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus , giving rise to a varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are usually triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground. They are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric lightning, so they are more akin to fluorescent tube discharges than to lightning discharges" (ref Wiki)
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