Photographer Captures Enormous Red Sprite in the Sky and Perseid Meteor Shower
A photographer has captured a remarkable image showing a giant red sprite that appeared on the night of the Perseid meteor shower which he also caught on camera.
Paul Smith photographed the stunning natural phenomenon in the early hours of August 12 in western Oklahoma. The final image consists of 12 meteor streaks with the base image showing the enormous sprite which the photographer reckons to be 30×30 miles.
Sprites are huge breakdowns in the atmosphere above powerful lightning strikes and are a type of transient luminous event (TLE). There have been reports of strange flashes above thunderstorms for hundreds of years but sprites weren’t caught on camera until 1989.
Smith tells PetaPixel that the lightning storm he was photographing was about 100 miles away and his successful capture came from years of studying the rare upper atmosphere events.
For his latest image, Smith says he “scrambled for an interesting foreground as a distant storm ramped up and sprites began to fire fiercely.” He found a dirt road leading to a distant wind farm with red lights that perfectly complemented the red sprites above.
“I just have a lot of experience chasing sprites now,” he explains. “Pretty much obsessed and focused on them for almost a decade. My forecasting is getting better all the time and my technique honed in with the experience of dozens of failures among the successes. It’s an expensive and challenging obsession, involving lots of travel and sleepless nights, but when it works out the results can be incredible.”
Smith says that if he’s not at work, he is researching sprites, studying the forecast, or traveling toward his next storm in the hope of capturing another sprite.
The photographer was recently interviewed for an article in The Washington Post all about sprites in which he says the key is to “stand far enough away from clouds to see above them. Let your eyes adjust to the dark sky until stars appear, increasingly difficult with light pollution. Set up your camera for video and wait.”
Smith explains on his X page (formerly Twitter) that sprites are “huge breakdowns in the atmosphere above strong lightning strikes. They form as gases are torn apart and release photons in a transient electric field high in the atmosphere.”
They are still poorly understood but the particular type of sprite Smith captured is referred to as a jellyfish sprite.
“Beautiful, large, and mysteriously complex, they are the night sky’s kings,” he adds.
More of Smith’s work can be found on his X, Instagram, Facebook, and website.
Image credits: Photographs by Paul Smith
