Circular Elves And Blue Jets (Notice normal lightining at the very bottom of the image)
Military specialists in Beijing, adds Tai Yang Bao, believe production of the high-tech weapons will begin soon. The new weapons will include supersonic bombers, extra-long-range modified anti-warship missiles, sky-wave and ground-wave over-the-horizon radars, as well as tactical air defense laser weapons and shore-to-warship laser cannon weapons.
February 1st. Cold. Excited photographer. Shuttle re-entry. Quick rewind.
Motorized cameras automatically rewind their exposed film. In dry, cold weather, this may cause static streaking, which looks like horizontal lightning, on your film. When you're finished shooting, remove the camera batteries and bring it all indoors. Once the camera and film reach room temperature—in about an hour—replace the batteries and rewind the film. With manual cameras, rewind the film very slowly.
The Balloon goes up over lightning! (Sprites and related phenomena)
This is NOT Camera error, as was posited earlier.
All this "toward" and "behind" nonsense is sleight-of-hand from the reporter, just spin to shape the evidence into a form more exciting and newsworthy. This is a single, 4-second exposure, not a movie or video—any motion is inferred, not discerned. There's no way to know whether the purple streak came from the shuttle, went to the shuttle, appeared 4 full seconds in front of the shuttle, 4 seconds behind the shuttle—anything is possible.
For example, here's my interpretation of the picture, every bit as valid as the reporter's: "The shuttle emitted a bright flash. Two bright pieces of debris burst out from the explosion. One corkscrewed upward for a distance, the other flew downward until the turbulence of the shuttle's passage blew it back up into the craft's contrail." A lot of sophisticated computer image analysis might be able to pick between the reporter's just-so story and mine; simply looking at the picture with the naked eye cannot.
Circular Elves And Blue Jets (Notice normal lightining at the very bottom of the image)
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Lightning between
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ILLUSTRATIONS: |
Since ancient times, lightning has both awed and fascinated people with its splendor and might. The early Greeks, for instance, associated the lightning bolt with Zeus, their most powerful god. And even after a modern understanding of the electrical nature of lightning developed, certain mysteries persisted. Many observers described luminous displays flickering through the upper reaches of the night sky. Some of these curiosities could be explained as auroras or weirdly illuminated clouds, but others were more baffling. In particular, pilots flying through the darkness occasionally observed strange flashes above thunderstorms. But the scientific community largely regarded these reports as apocryphal--until 1990, when John R. Winckler and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota first captured one of these enigmatic phantoms using a video camera. Their images revealed lightning of a completely new configuration.
Winckler's achievement ushered in a flurry of activity to document such high-altitude electrical phenomena. And hundreds of similar observations--from the space shuttle, from aircraft and from the ground--have since followed. The result has been a growing appreciation that lightninglike effects are not at all restricted to the lower atmospheric layers sandwiched between storm clouds and the ground. Indeed, scientists now realize that electrical discharges take place regularly in the rarefied air up to 90 kilometers above thunderclouds. It is remarkable that these events, many of which are visible to the naked eye, went undiscovered for so long. In retrospect, the existence of some form of lightning high in the atmosphere should not have come as a surprise to scientists. They have long known that well above the turbulent parts of the atmosphere, ultraviolet rays from the sun strike gas molecules and knock electrons loose from them. This process forms the ionosphere, an electrically conductive layer that encircles the earth. Large differences in voltage can exist between storm clouds and the ionosphere, just as they do between clouds and the ground. Impelled by such enormous voltages, lightning can invade either zone when the air--which is typically an electrical insulator--breaks down and provides a conductive path for electric currents to follow.
Because the atmosphere becomes less dense with increasing altitude, the lightning that happens at greater heights involves fewer air molecules and produces colors not seen in typical discharges. Usually they appear red and are only faintly visible. Thus, researchers must employ sensitive video cameras to record these events against the backdrop of the darkened night sky. The feebleness of the light given off and the transient nature of such emissions combine to present severe technical challenges to the researchers involved in studying these ghostly atmospheric events. Nevertheless, in just a few years investigators have made considerable progress in understanding them.
The newly discovered electrical events of the upper atmosphere fall into four categories. Two types of high-level lightning, termed sprites and elves, appear (despite their fanciful names) to be manifestations of well-understood atmospheric physics. The causes for the other two varieties, called blue jets and gamma-ray events, remain more speculative. But our research group and many others around the world are still amassing our observations in hopes of deciphering the physical mechanisms driving these strange occurrences as well. Until that time, we must admit something like the ancient sense of awe and wonder when we contemplate these curious bursts of energy that dance through the ethereal world between earth and space. Further Reading DISCOVERY OF INTENSE GAMMA-RAY FLASHES OF ATMOSPHERIC ORIGIN. G. J. Fishman, P. N. Bhat, R. Mallozzi, J. M. Horack, T. Koshut, C. Kouveliotou, G. N. Pendleton, C. A. Meegan, R. B. Wilson, W. S. Paciesas, S. J. Goodman and H. J. Christian in Science, Vol. 264, pages 1313-1316; May 27, 1994. PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE SPRITES94 AIRCRAFT CAMPAIGN, 1: RED SPRITES. D. D. Sentman, E. M. Wescott, D. L. Osborne, D. L. Hampton and M. J. Heavner in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 22, No. 10, pages 1205-1208; May 15, 1995. PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE SPRITES94 AIRCRAFT CAMPAIGN, 2: BLUE JETS. E. M. Wescott, D. Sentman, D. Osborne, D. Hampton and M. Heavner in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 22, No. 10, pages 1209-1212; May 15, 1995. ELVES: LIGHTNING-INDUCED TRANSIENT LUMINOUS EVENTS IN THE LOWER IONOSPHERE. H. Fukunishi, Y. Takahashi, M. Kubota, K. Sakanoi, U. S. Inan and W. A. Lyons in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 23, No. 16, pages 2157-2160; August 1, 1996. Related Links Sprites, Q-Bursts and Positive Ground Strokes Walter Lyons' Handy Weather Answer Book
The Authors STEPHEN B. MENDE, DAVIS D. SENTMAN and EUGENE M. WESCOTT have spent much of their time during recent years investigating curious electrical activity of the upper atmosphere. Mende received a Ph.D. in physics from Imperial College at the University of London in 1965. From 1967 to 1996 he worked for Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory. Mende is currently a fellow at the space sciences laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. Sentman studied space physics under James Van Allen at the University of Iowa, where he earned his doctorate in 1976. After 14 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sentman joined the physics department at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he now serves on the faculty. Wescott received a Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1964. He worked for three years at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before returning to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks as a professor of geophysics. |
SPRITES are high-altitude luminous flashes that take place above thunderstorms in a part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. Although sprites are usually rare, some storms can spawn them frequently. Typically the upper parts of clouds are charged positively and the lower parts negatively. Most often, it is the negative base of the cloud that flashes to the ground. But at times the upper, positive part can discharge directly to the earth, producing a lightning flash of exceptional intensity. About one out of 20 such positive cloud-to-ground lightning bolts are sufficiently energetic that they spawn sprites. These examples, recorded from the ground with a monochromatic video camera, have been colorized to match a color image obtained from an aircraft.
LIGHTNING (below, left) usually carries negative charge from the base of a cloud down to the earth. Sometimes powerful strokes (center) cause the positive charge that had built up near the top of the cloud to disappear abruptly. The large electrical field (gradation in color) created between the cloud top and the ionosphere pulls electrons upward, where they collide with gas molecules. If the electrical field is sufficiently strong and the air sufficiently thin, the electrons will accelerate unimpeded and reach the velocity needed to transfer their kinetic energy to the electronic structure of the molecules with which they collide, raising such molecules to an "excited state." The excited molecules give away their newly acquired energy by the emission of light, causing sprites (below, right). They typically span from 50 to 90 kilometers altitude.
Okay, you photograph a subject traveling across the sky at 12,000 mph with a 4-6 second shutter time. You have to track the subject to keep it from blurring. If you track the moving subject, then wouldn't falling debris appear blurred because of the camera's tracking movement? Seems to me this artifact would have to have been produced by a very bright and instantaneous source. Much like an electronic flash.
Worst. Necklace. Ever.
Um, is there some reason to believe the bio is false? You don't have to source a bio blurb.
