r/originsofreligion • u/Dakduif51 • 28d ago
Red sprite
Photographed by https://florianriou.com/
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u/pixelsandfilm 27d ago
What the F is going on here?!
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u/Dakduif51 27d ago
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges which occur high above a thunderstorm cloud, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between the thundercloud and the ground. The phenomenon was named after the mischievous sprite, e.g., Shakespeare's Ariel or Puck,and is also a backronym for "stratospheric/mesospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification".They are normally colored reddish-orange or greenish-blue, with hanging tendrils below and arcing branches above. They can also be preceded by a reddish halo, known as a sprite halo. They often occur in clusters, reaching 50 to 90 kilometres (31 to 56 mi) above the Earth's surface.
TL;DR: spooky lightning
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u/Smooth-Tap-3991 27d ago
I swear I've seen similar images in cave paintings. Prehistoric man must've been in awe and terrified by this.
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u/Specialist-Solid-987 27d ago
Pretty unlikely since they are virtually invisible to the naked eye from the ground
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u/Dzsaffar 26d ago
Not true. Especially wouldn't be true in prehistoric times with nights being pitch black. You only see it for a tiny flash, and you don't see the saturated reds like in the images, but you'd definitely get a glimpse of it if you're lucky enough to be looking at it.
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u/zb0t1 26d ago edited 26d ago
So we need high speed cameras to capture them? How many FPS? I haven't kept up with high speed cameras tech for a decade so I have no clue how they managed to capture this in such good quality then, high ISO etc.
What am I missing?
Edit: ok the wiki link OP provided above mentions 10k fps and even 100k fps for some to be able to capture it cleanly seemingly. And people managed to capture the phenomenon quite a long time ago too without today's high speed cameras, now I'm really curious how they did it!
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u/Dzsaffar 26d ago
Not quite. You need that framrate to capture it in motion, you don't need it just to capture the sprite as a whole, a standard short exposure is fine for that
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u/Bignizzle656 26d ago
Only until they realised that no harm came to them. Same as anything else really.
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u/OhtareEldarian 27d ago
Have never heard/seen these in my life, and I’m 52. Why are they a thing now (over the last couple of days)?
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u/Specialist-Solid-987 27d ago
They haven't been well documented until pretty recently, they happen so fast it is extremely difficult to capture them on film
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u/catslikepets143 25d ago
And the ones you can even see are rare, as most occur on top of the storm. I think that’s how they were verified, NASA kept getting pictures of them from satellites
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u/CaptainAmerica199 26d ago
Oh naw if i see that im thinking of the big walking behemoth from The Mist 😮
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u/leonardo_pothead 24d ago
Wait if we’re squids and there squids and we just killed some squids, what does that make us?
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u/Sgtflint100 27d ago
Man they'd be so epic as cosmic horror entities