Although summer hasn't officially started yet, there are already summer thunderstorms on the Great Plains. Kevin Palivek, who operates several cameras to observe the night sky, noted that the season of sprites can definitely be considered as the beginning. This week, he photographed several of these lightning bolts, including giant jets shooting upward from a thundercloud in Oklahoma.
The line of storms in Oklahoma was ideally located, which helped to record the jets hitting through cloud tops about 483 km from the camera. Palivek used a black-and-white Watec 902h Ultimate camera in a weatherproof enclosure mounted on a 6-meter tower.
Giant jets can be compared to "sprites on steroids". These lightning bolts are much more powerful and rarer than their red cousins. Palivek observed the sky in Texas for 6 years, but so far he has only been able to take pictures of 5 giant jets, 2 of which have been studied in research work. Nevertheless, according to him, it is always interesting to observe them. This entry was made on May 14th.
Sprites and jets are "exotic" forms of lightning that fly upward from a thunderstorm, not downward. Some researchers believe that they are related to cosmic rays - subatomic particles from deep space hit the upper part of the Earth's atmosphere, producing secondary electrons, which trigger these lightning. If this is true, then there will be more sprites and jets in the coming years, because the intensity of cosmic radiation will increase due to the decline of the solar cycle. Although sprites have been observed for at least a century, most scientists did not believe they existed until 1989, when they were photographed by cameras aboard a spacecraft.