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Possible link between cosmic rays and ‘sprites’ as Earth experiences the solar minimum.
April 23, 2020: A series of unusually severe spring storms parading across the southeastern USA has residents taking shelter from golf-ball sized hail and dangerous tornadoes. High above the maelstrom, sprites are dancing. Paul M. Smith of Edmond, Oklahoma, captured these specimens on April 22nd.
“There were tornado warnings and very large hail throughout the night,” says Smith. “I photographed the sprites through a clearing around midnight.”
Sprites are a form of electricity in powerful storm clouds. While regular lightning lances down, sprites leap up. They can reach all the way to the edge of space 90 km or more above Earth’s surface. Spring thunderstorms often produce the year’s first big sprites, and the sightings continue through late summer.
“My camera was pointed toward Oklahoma City,” says Smith, “and the sprites were about 150 miles away.” This radar weather map shows shows the observing geometry:
When observing sprites, this kind…
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Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Interesting. I didn’t know sprites were visible from the ground.
Difficult to spot…
Although visually very faint, in part owing to their distance, and lasting like lightning only for a very short time, sprites are very energetic phenomena and have sizes ranging up to several tens of kilometres across. They are usually red in colour, which is difficult for the human eye to detect, and last at most for up to a few hundredths of a second, which also makes them very difficult to see. Their discovery in the late 1980s was very unexpected, and brought about by the advent of light-sensitive, surveillance-type video cameras.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130905165731/http://star.arm.ac.uk/press/2013/sprite.html