Sprite Lightning in High Definition

apod.nasa.gov

140 points·Breadmaker··12 comments

At first I thought "wow, they're so smooth" but then realized that the dynamics must be so incredibly fast that the fuzzy smoothness is really just motion blur. Amazing though....

The article said that they form as ionized balls that can move at ten percent of the speed of light. That's almost 30 million miles an hour! I don't know what to say, except that nature is f'ing amazing!

And I'd love to know what those downward branching structures are...

I find that just creepy looking. I could imagine that visitors from somewhere else could look like that.

Buried the lede:

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: Sometimes lightning occurs out near space.

Red sprite lightning, for people dreaming of living on the red planet, I guess.

What are you talking about? This photo was taken on Earth, not Mars.

click "extraordinarily high-resolution" ;)

at least they weren't playing poker

When clicking on the link to try to view the high resolution image, first I got dogs (which was humorous, I'll admit), but the second time I was taken to Facebook which of course just has highly compressed jpegs... why are they making it so difficult

The image itself links to the full resolution. But this is high-resolution compared to other photos of sprites, not high-resolution compared to photos in general.

care to explain how clicking a link a second time takes you somewhere else?

It does if you fat finger it and accidentally click the Facebook link that's one line above on the mobile layout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com