Rare Lighting That Shoots Upward Captured From Space
A lightning chaser has spotted a gigantic jet in a photo taken from onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Only a handful of images of this rare form of lightning exists.
Frankie Lucena, who PetaPixel has featured for his own photos of gigantic jets, spotted the rare bolt while browsing through photos on the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth website.
“I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event and found that there were four photos in all,” Lucena tells Space Weather.
Lucena took those four frames and animated them in a short video (see below), which he describes as a “gigantic jet event.”
The exact location of the photo is unknown, but it was likely off the coast of New Orleans, based on the position of the ISS at the time the photo was taken.
The identity of the astronaut who took the photos is also unknown, but Don Pettit, an accomplished photographer, was onboard the ISS on November 19 and has been trying to get a photo directly above a lightning jet since joining the floating space station.
“Both Matthew [Dominick] and I have been shooting nadir with a 200mm telephoto lens to try and catch a straight-down nadir view of a sprite,” Pettit said back in October.
The aforementioned sprite is similar to a gigantic jet: both are types of upper-atmospheric lightning, but they have key differences. While gigantic jets are rarer and more powerful discharges that can reach all the way to space, sprites are red, jellyfish-like electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorms and are usually triggered by strong lightning strikes below.
Gigantic jets are sometimes referred to as “Earth’s tallest lightning” because they can reach 50 miles high, all the way up to the ionosphere. Space Weather notes that they seem to mainly appear over water and have a habit of scaring airline passengers.
Scientists have yet to uncover the reason why gigantic jets shoot upward rather than down like typical lightning bolts. It could be because of some sort of blockage that prevents the lightning from exiting the bottom of the cloud, but researchers remain unsure.
