A flash of lightning, and then – something else.
A flash of lightning, and then – something else. High above the storm, a crimson figure blinks in and out of existence. If you saw it, you are a lucky witness of a sprite, one of the least-understood electrical phenomena in Earth’s upper atmosphere. But if you caught it on camera, your photo could contribute to a ground-breaking scientific discovery.
NASA’s newest citizen science project, Spritacular (pronounced sprite-tacular), leverages the power of crowdsourcing to advance the study of sprites and other Transient Luminous Events, or TLEs. TLEs include a range of electrical phenomena that occur above thunderstorms and produce brief flashes of light. The new citizen science project aims to connect professional scientists with members of the public who would like their camerawork to contribute to scientific studies.
“People capture wonderful images of sprites, but they're shared sporadically over the internet and most of the scientific community is unaware of these captures,” said Dr. Burcu Kosar, a space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and Spritacular principal investigator. “Spritacular will bridge this gap by creating the first crowdsourced database of sprites and other TLEs that is accessible and readily available for scientific research.”
Read more at NASA
Image: Red sprites formed above thunderstorms in the southeast Aegean Sea, as captured from the eastern suburbs of Athens, Greece on December 4, 2021.
(Credits: Copyright Thanasis Papathanasiou)
