• A sprite at the horizon, with lightning below in the troposphere and above the green line of airglow at the upper mesopause and
• … See more

The earliest known report is by Toynbee and Mackenzie in 1886. Nobel laureate C. T. R. Wilson had suggested in 1925, on theoretical grounds, that electrical breakdown could occur in the upper atmospher… See more

• Different types of electrical phenomena in the atmosphere
• A sprite seen from the International Space Station (top right, faint red above the lightning).
• ISS sprite image above; zoomed in … See more

Sprites occur near the top of the mesosphere at about 80 km altitude in response to the electric field generated by lightning flashes in underlying thunderstorms. When a sufficiently large positive lig… See more

Sprites are sometimes preceded, by about 1 millisecond, by a sprite halo, a pancake-shaped region of weak, transient optical emissions approximately 50 kilometres (31 mi) across and 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) thick. The halo is … See more

Sprites have been blamed for otherwise unexplained accidents involving high altitude vehicular operations above thunderstorms. One example of this is the malfunction of a NASA stratospheric balloon launched o… See more