Over Corsica captured rare “red sprites”. Photo Photo

Over Corsica captured a rare natural phenomenon – “red sprites”. The photographer, French photographer Florian Riou, told the social network LinkedIn that he had previously calculated the opportunity to photograph a rare phenomenon.

“Having carefully predicted the thunderstorms off the coast of Spain and studied the angles from different points of view, I understood that there is a chance that it will be possible to combine in the frame a village near Calvi and short-term light phenomena that could occur over powerful thunderstorms at a distance of 500-700 km,” the photographer wrote.

Red sprites are short-term electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere that occur over powerful thunderstorms at an altitude of about 50-90 km. They are the glow of rarefied gases under the influence of an electric field. Sprites are usually red due to the glow of molecular nitrogen and can take the form of vertical pillars, branching threads or jellyfish. Flashes last only a few milliseconds, and their size can reach tens of kilometers in height.

Unlike ordinary lightning, sprites do not occur between the cloud and the ground, but in the mesosphere – well above thunderstorm clouds, usually as a reaction to powerful lightning discharges. They are not a stream of hot plasma, like ordinary lightning: glow occurs when gas molecules are excited by accelerated electrons. Sprites are difficult to observe from the surface of the Earth due to their short duration and the fact that they are often covered by storm clouds. The first convincing instrumental evidence of their existence was received in 1989.