APOD: 2025 December 23 Б Red Sprites and Circular Elves Lightning over Italy
23.12.2025

What's happening in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, including tentacled red sprites and ringed ELVES.

Burning Tree Sprite
2.08.2001

This dramatic, garishly colored image was captured with a low-light level camera on 2001 June 7. It shows what appears to be a "burning tree" above the National Cheng Kung University campus in Tainan City, Taiwan ... but the burning tree is actually a fleeting red sprite 300 kilometers away.

Gigantic Jet Lightning from Puerto Rico
29.09.2021

Have you ever seen a gigantic jet? They are extremely rare but tremendously powerful. Gigantic jets are a type of lightning discharge documented only this century that occur between some thunderstorms and the Earth's ionosphere high above them.

APOD: 2023 April 17 Б ELVES Lightning over Italy
17.04.2023

What's that red ring in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, including red sprites and blue jets.

Red Sprite Lightning
11.11.1995

Recently two new types of lightning have been verified: red sprites and blue jets. These atmospheric discharges occur very high in the Earth's atmosphere - much higher than the familiar form of lightning.

Lightning on Jupiter
12.05.1997

Does lightning occur only on Earth? Spacecraft in our Solar System have detected radio signals consistent with lightning on other planets, including Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In the above photograph, optical flashes from Jupiter were photographed recently by the Galileo orbiter. Each of the circled dots indicates lightning.

Night Lightning on Jupiter
16.12.1997

Why is there lightning on Jupiter? Lightning is a sudden rush of electrically charged particles from one location to another. To create lightning, charges must first separate inside a cloud. On Earth, drafts of colliding ice and water droplets usually create this charge separation, but what happens on Jupiter?

Lightning and the Space Shuttle
10.11.1995

There are many things about lightning that are not understood. Lightning has been seen in the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. A leading theory is that collisions of particles in clouds cause large areas of positive and negative charge.

APOD: 2025 July 27 Б Lightning over the Volcano of Water
27.07.2025

Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? You're not alone. Details of what causes lightning are still being researched, but it is known that inside some clouds, internal updrafts cause collisions between ice and snow that slowly separate charges between cloud tops and bottoms.

Sprite Lightning at 100000 Frames Per Second
4.01.2021

What causes sprite lightning? Mysterious bursts of light in the sky that momentarily resemble gigantic jellyfish have been recorded for over 30 years, but apart from a general association with positive cloud-to-ground lightning, their root cause remains unknown. Some thunderstorms have them -- most don't.