Mediterranean sprites Oct-Dec + high-speed

It's been a long time since the last blog post. This does not mean there were no sprites! On the contrary, the months October-December have been more active than the months before. The camera on Corsica recorded 71 sprites over a stationary MCS in southern France in the night of 21-22 October, but the solar panels got covered by snow shortly after and the camera has not been in use since. Pic du Midi was uninstalled in early November because large chunks of ice were falling from the television tower above. Its last success seems to be the night of 24-25 October.

From central Catalonia (northeastern Spain) a total of 367 events have been recorded since July 1st till now. In late November and December also a lot of elves. As it turns out, even quite small, low topped thunderstorms can produce sprites and elves. On satellite they look like grey pancakes. A best-of series of images and some videos will appear soon on www.lightningwizard.com, you can find now already some new colour photos of sprites, and lightning.

In early December Joan Montanyà and I (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) made our first observations with our Phantom 7.3 high-speed camera with an image intensifier. We operated it from a hill in central Catalonia. We have recorded now 16 elves and 15 sprites at 6688 frames per second or greater during two nights. Here is an example (more will be shown on our site later):



It shows an elve passing through the view, then a long quiet period followed by the developments of a sprite at about 85% into the video.