A while back I heard a wild theory that the shuttle Columbia was brought down because of high-altitude megalightning, or sprites. And there was a documentary about this lightning phenomoenon that I found rather fascinating. (These tentacled sprites can extend for 50 miles above the Earth!)
Then today, from New Scientist, appears an amazing slow motion video of a lightning sprite in action (RealPlayer version here)
In summer 2005, researchers from Duke University, US, and collaborators from FMA Research in Fort Collins, Colorado, US, kept a watchful eye on the skies above the Great Plains from the Yucca Ridge Field Station in Fort Collins, hoping to capture sprites in action using their 7000-frames-per-second camera. And capture it they did
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I am the NASA Researcher and the Principal Investigator for the Mesoscale Lightning Experiment that was designed to study lightning from space, using the on-board B & W TV TV cameras of the Space Shuttle. I am the researcher that began the Thunderstorm Overflight to study lightning using the NASA U-2 U-2 aircraft in the late 70's to record both video, photographs, and elecrtonic signatures of lightning. One of the U-2 pilots told me of seeing that he had ightning moving toward the Stratosphere and with that observation that I became very interested in this unusal lighting