> 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!
> 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.
Oh yes, let's everyone stop posting links to twitter because someone disagrees with the political views of the owner. So much for having some tolerance right?
Just 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.
> 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.
No 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]?
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. . .
The 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.
For 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
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