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(International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/A. Smith) ============================================================ In a stormy Hawaiian sky in July 2017, streaks of red and blue lightning seemed to meet above a bed of white light. Cameras on the Gemini North telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea snapped a stunning picture of the multi-colored light show. The National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) released the photo on Wednesday as its "image of the week". The lightning in the image "appears so otherworldly that it looks like it must be a special effect," NOIRLab said. It also published a zoomable version. These colorful lightning phenomena are aptly...

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...

<p>SAN JOSE, Calif.(AP) - The space shuttle Columbia broke up in a mysterious area of the upper atmosphere once so little understood and difficult to study that scientists dubbed it the "ignorosphere."</p> <p>On Friday, NASA said it has asked outside atmospheric scientists for their opinion on whether some sort of electrical discharge could have occurred as the shuttle screamed toward touchdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.</p>