Red sprite lightning is both mysterious and intriguing: sprites occur only at high altitudes above thunderstorms, only last for a thousandth of a second, and emit light in the red portion of the visible spectrum. Therefore, studying sprites has been notoriously difficult for atmospheric scientists.
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| Elusive sprite lightning captured from an airplane above Boulder, Colorado Credit and copyright: Jason Ahrns. |
This article by Nancy Atkinson originally appeared at Universe Today.
11 comments:
Sprites are fine but they really should name a kind of lightning after gremlins.
My bike had a curious failure, the gears stuck on low climbing a near-vertical hill on the high route home.
No obvious cause.
Poking at things with the onboard 9mm socket tool got it back in 4th gear when the shifter was in high.
This is the opposite of things slipping. Somehow the cable tightened.
It must be a failure of some kind internal to the trigger shifter.
The rear derailleur was liquid-wrenched into free movement again, the cable loosened and recalibrated for things as they are, and it seems to work.
For how long is a question.
Maximum walk home when it doesn't : 4 hours.
I ordered new power train parts from amazon, but you don't want to install anything until you have to.
Say after a walk home.
Lightning is fascinating. We drove home from north of the city one summer night in KC. The lightning lit up the sky in front of us. It was better than any fireworks display we've ever seen.
Appropriate hue for Boulder,CO. :-]
Natures elusive fireworks. Pretty. Anyone ever seen Fulgurite before?
When I was a kid, I sat out on my front porch in an aluminum folding chair and watched an all night lightning display during the winter that was literally over my head. How I didn't get nailed looking back on it is a mystery.
I have seen fulgurite.
The video reminded me of looking at ultrasounds.
Sixty Grit said...
I have seen fulgurite.
I've never had the pleasure. What's it like?
A hollow glass tube with sand encrusted on the sides. Saw it at a museum down at the beach - I think it was the museum/aquarium in Virginia Beach.
Fulgurites are extremely fragile, as you might imagine, and while some have been found that are several meters long, the one I saw was about two feet long.
Very cool.
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