Posted on 04/08/2018 6:27:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), these unusual features were first spotted by accident in 1989.
Minnesota professor John R Winckler was testing a television camera in advance of an upcoming rocket launch, when he realised that two frames showed bright columns of light above a distant storm cloud.
The discovery came as a shock to scientists at the time, according to Dr Torsten Neubert, ASIM's lead scientist. "That really surprised all of us. How come this exists and we didn't know it? Airline pilots must have known about it - there are some anecdotal descriptions," the Technical University of Denmark physicist said.
For the better part of a century before TLEs were caught on camera, people who spotted them had been reporting "rocket lightning" or "upward lightning". Now in need of names, the phenomena were christened sprites and elves because of their fleeting, mysterious nature.
Yet despite their diminutive monikers, these features are anything but small, and extend tens of kilometres into the atmosphere.
"They are slightly different to lightning," Dr Neubert told BBC News. "It's a pulse of the electric field that travels up. For the sprite - when the atmosphere gets thin, the field can get a discharge."
Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike.
Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.
Although they are more elusive, "elves are incredibly well understood," says Dr Martin Fullekrug from the University of Bath.
They are the most common TLE, thought to occur twice as often as sprites.
Blue jets - upward electrical discharges from cloud tops - are the least well known
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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#16 I do not see a canyon but a raised surface in 3d with a squiggly river on top.
Satellite images, as well as pictures taken by astronauts in orbit, seem to indicate that the Grand Canyon is an enormous Lichtenberg figure, in other words, a gigantic lightning scar. As the Electric Universe hypothesis suggests, electric discharge machining (EDM) might account for the Canyon’s appearance: steep walls, thousands of layers, brachiated side canyons at practically every scale, and periodic, hemispherical “nips” cut into each rim.
http://www.ifiseeu.com/geophysics/grand-canyon-1.htm
So you are saying that Thor is behind this? : )
Thanks BenLurkin.
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Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike. Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.
Me neither....21,000+ hours, USAF commercial airline and only Northern lights, and Comet Kohoutek!
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