Residents of Chelyabinsk were seriously frightened by a strange "eye" that appeared over the city on March 30, 2017 and was called the "all-seeing eye of providence" and even the "eye of Sauron". The reasons for the appearance of this "heavenly gaze" have not yet been clarified.
Whatever the source of the Chelyabinsk eye, it may be the same as that of another giant "eye" that appeared on April 2, 2017 in the sky over the Czech Republic during a powerful thunderstorm and was filmed by the amateur astronomer Martin Popek.
According to meteorologists, the cause of the glowing red "eye" is most likely due to electromagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere, known as elves, which occur during extremely powerful lightning strikes. When such a flow of energy reaches the lower layers of the Earth's ionosphere, the atmospheric gases begin to glow and take the form of a dull reddish halo elongated in the horizontal plane.
Elves were first spotted over the coast of New Guinea from a shuttle in 1990. They belong to the group of rare phenomena and appear accompanied by atmospheric lightning, blue streams and sprites. And, of course, Martin Popek was lucky to catch a rare red sprite shortly after the "eye" appeared.
Elves tend to be only milliseconds long, making them incredibly difficult to document. For this reason, they remain one of the most mysterious phenomena on Earth. They are practically invisible to the human eye, and if you manage to photograph them, it's amazing luck.
Voronina Svetlana
