Thursday Night Sprites!

A very unstable, dynamic weather situation has led to numerous thunderstorms over France last Thursday night (28-29 July). When Pic du Midi finally emerged out of the cloud deck, many sprite events have been recorded between 0128 UT and 0204 UT, some consisted of multiple frames with separate new sprites. Camera operator Agnes Mika, one out of two girls in our team (...), has taken the lead with a topscore of at least 11 sprites so far! She initially thought that she had caught just two sprites, posted the message here and went to bed!

The first sprite was recorded at 0129 UT. A typical multiple-column sprite that was apparently triggered by a 197 kA positive cloud-to-ground flash. This flash has shown up on the lightning map as a big cross. Most sprites happened over this area.



Here is a little gallery of the nicest images for you, in random order. Please respect that you may use these images only in the form as they are presented here, without any modification.



The last sprite image above shows a carrot-type sprite that occurred on 0140 UT. This was the biggest event of the series, many different frames were captured. Note that the wide-view camera has a strange grey-shade problem that needs to be resolved, fortunately the narrow-view camera does yield high quality images. The phenomenal close-up of this carrot sprite, zooming in on the tendrils with beads, is shown below. The first human to witness this unbelievable image was Oscar, who's eyes almost dropped out of his head and his heart skipped a beat!



Since the Danish National Space Center conducted their EuroSprite campaigns in 2000 and 2003, the images above are the most detailed obtained so far!