Spring sprites from Italy

Message from Roberto Labanti, Italy: On March 24, at 01:58:45 UT CIPH SOSO system located in San Lazzaro di Savena, Italy, caught his first sprite event of this year, near the limit of its field of view. The sprite could be linked to a thunderstorm in the South/South-East direction, unfortunately off-view.

Update (24 April 2008):
Around midnight April 18-19, the CIPH SOSO system caught five sprite events in a period of ten minutes, when a thunderstorm was active in the East.
Videos and images are available on CIPH SOSO blog.

Winter sprites and elves over the Bay of Biscay

Happy new year!

It seems we should call it EuroSprite 2008, because here are the first sprites and elves of the new year! I've run the remotely controlled camera of Lannemezan twice already. It captured quite a lot of events between the clouds, of which many are transient luminous events. Yes, the wintery showers with an occasional thunder arriving from the sea produce many elves and also sprites, when they are clustered together. A big thunderstorm is not required. Take a look at the Bay of Biscay in these satellite images:


January 11 2008: 4 TLEs (elves or halos) in the evening. They were at the rightmost side of the view. Not really interesting images to show, but nevertheless events. Clouds probably prevented from capturing more.



16-17 January (last night): 16 TLEs: 9 elves and 7 sprites. The storms look more clustered into bands compared to the previous case which is probably more favourable for large charge reservoirs that supply the strong discharges needed for sprites.
Here are some images:

Above is a bright elve followed by a sprite a few frames later. The color is added this time to bring some change from all the grey stuff.

Above is another elve.

Above is a group of columns.

And a nice carrot! Note in the images at the bottom right corner is a LINET crossed-loop lightning detection antenna.
Tonight sprites and elves over the Mediterranean Sea, hopefully observable (i.e. no clouds)!

16-17 and 17-18 December 2007: Sprites & Elves

A bubble of cold air at mid tropospheric levels swung around the large high pressure area over the European mainland and settled over the western Mediterranean Sea. The wintery thundershowers that resulted created a variety of Transient Luminous Events (TLE): about 34 during the first night, 23 during the second night as recorded by the camera just north of the Pyrenees.
Some sprites were so small that the software only triggered on the lightning flash, and thus one may expect these would otherwise be missed.

16-17 December events:

• Halo only: 3
• Elve: 7
• Sprite (normal): 17
• Sprite (otherwise undetected): 7

Here are some images:

Halo inside:
Elve:
Another big event with a halo inside:

17-18 December events:

• Halo only: 1 (but several simultaneous with sprites)
• Elve: 6
• Sprite (normal): 16

A circular group of columns:

Another elve, with slightly irregular patterns of luminosity:

One from my balcony in Toulouse (camera set up only very late). Unfortunately outside the view of the camera at Lannemezan. My camera gives a less noisy but also less bright image because the gain is manually controlled and here I used also gamma=off.

The Eurosprite Team wishes you a Merry Christmas
and a Very Happy 2008!

15-16 November: >26 sprites, many elves and haloes!

Hi there!
This night there were storms at the north side of an intense low west of Corsica. At ~2215 UT the cameras of Pic du Midi and Lannemezan were turned on and started capturing sprites. Almost all events were captured in stereo. Corsica was once again not reacting much to commands, unfortunately. Bob Marshall from Stanford University operated his instruments as well.

Highlights are:

• Stereo images of sprites... good parallax visible between sprites and stars. It is a bit difficult to show here as a true stereo image, given the differences in exposure, image size and aspect ratios between the two cameras, but in some images you can notice different perspectives (left is Lan, right is Pic... if only they would appear on one row...)

and


followed by...

• Many elves (never seen so many before!): at least 6, and a number of haloes (mostly together with sprites) as well. The elves were very bright and were in all cases accompanied by subsequent sprites. A few cases show an elve, a halo and a sprite, with distinctive differences in height. Some elves show a hole that is not circular at all, like the first and second ones here:

same sprite by the two cameras:

The moon is visible as a bright spot to the right of the sprite. The perspective is apparent from the distance between sprite and moon.

• The color camera recorded one or two of the sprites to be white (note that this is judged from a contrast-stretched image...) .When pulled into Image Analyzer, it shows that the green pixels were the brightest. It could be an artifact , but the colour appears completely different from all other sprites recorded last month which were definately red.

From the same huge column sprite shown above (second row), two subsequent color frames:


and another 'white' sprite:

and a normal one:


A bonus:

• A Huge fireball streaked across the sky, captured both by Lannemezan and by Pic du Midi!

The top one is the peakhold image, the bottom one interlaced frame showing the tail. Note that the lens has no IR focus correction fitted, making the lights smeared out and also the meteor. But you get a good idea of its brightness.

Note that I added some new images for the end of October cases two posts below!