Tuesday, November 15, 2005

An icy moonlight Spritewatch

A lightening thunderstorm top near the Spanish coast around 19:40 UT. Moonlight lights up the mountains and the sea of clouds.



Tower covered by ice...

And the observatory :)


Strange events on September 26th?


What do we see in this image above, taken at 1:33 UT on September 26th?? A large structure with strong upward branching starting from two initial streamers, starting from a much lower altitude than the standard sprite?!
Have a look at the frame before:

Here we see the initial sprite with downward streamers fading out to below.

11 minutes before, a similar suspect event happened:


A weaker luminous upwardly branched feature. Also look at the preceding sprite in the frame sequence:



No, there is no other storm that may have produced a more distant sprite - it is not perspective. It does not appear to be a giant blue jet, because such an event would rise over several frames. They appears to be those "palm-tree" event as described in Matt Heavner's thesis, and probably the same as a dubbed a "troll" by Walter Lyons... very interesting!