For decades, some pilots who flew near big thunderstorms at night came home with a story they were reluctant to tell. Above the storm, well above the cloud tops where lightning has no business being, they had seen flashes of light shooting upward into the dark. Scientists were sceptical. There was no photograph, no instrument reading, and many pilots preferred not to put it in writing.

Then, on 6 July 1989, a camera caught one by accident. Today astronauts on the International Space Station photograph them from above, and a widely shared Instagram post of red sprites seen from the ISS has brought them back into the spotlight. They are real, they are enormous, and aviation played a bigger part in proving it than most people realise.

What a Sprite Actually Is

Sprites belong to a family of phenomena called transient luminous events, or TLEs. They appear above powerful thunderstorms, usually just after an unusually strong cloud-to-ground lightning stroke, and they happen in the mesosphere, roughly 50 to 90 kilometres up, far above the cloud tops and the cruising altitude of any airliner. Their red colour comes from nitrogen in the thin upper atmosphere glowing as the electrical breakdown passes through it. They can be tens of kilometres tall, and they are gone in a few hundredths of a second.

Sprites have relatives with equally whimsical names. Blue jets shoot upward out of the cloud tops in narrow cones. Gigantic jets reach from the top of a storm all the way up towards the edge of space. Elves are vast, expanding rings of light that last less than a thousandth of a second. Researchers have since added trolls and ghosts to the list.

The Pilots Nobody Believed

According to NASA’s Earth science data programme, the atmospheric scientists Bernard Vonnegut and O. H. “Skeet” Vaughan collected pilots’ accounts of strange light above thunderstorms through the 1980s. The scientific establishment was not convinced by reports of “upward lightning”, and many pilots were unwilling to report what they had seen officially. In a 1994 press release, NASA put it plainly: pilots and others had been reporting blue or green columns of light above thunderstorms for years.

The breakthrough was an accident. On 6 July 1989, John Winckler and Robert Franz of the University of Minnesota were testing a low-light video camera for a rocket experiment. Reviewing the tape, they found a twin flash of light above the horizon over a distant storm. Once scientists knew what to look for, they went back through hundreds of hours of Space Shuttle video and found more examples, many of which flashed past too quickly to notice at normal playback speed.

Chasing Sprites by Jet

Proving what pilots had been describing ultimately took aircraft. From July 1993, a University of Alaska Fairbanks team led by Davis Sentman and Eugene Wescott flew at night aboard NASA’s DC-8 airborne laboratory to film sprites from above the weather. In the summer of 1994 they went again, in two leased jets flown out of Oklahoma City. On 30 June 1994, over Arkansas, they recorded blue jets for the first time, and their colour video settled the question of what pilots had been seeing: sprites are red, jets are blue.

Flying was the obvious answer. From the ground, most sprites are hidden by the very storm that produces them. From an aircraft above the weather, or from orbit, there is a clear line of sight to the sky above the storm, which is also why pilots saw them long before anyone managed to record one.

The View From the Space Station

The International Space Station, about 400 kilometres up, is the best seat of all. Astronauts photograph sprites regularly now. NASA’s Nichole Ayers caught one above Mexico and the southern United States on 3 July 2025, and Matthew Dominick photographed red sprites above South Africa in June 2024. The European Space Agency’s Thor experiment, started by the Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen, and the Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM) mounted outside the Columbus module both study these events systematically.

There is a practical side to all this. Scientists study TLEs to understand how thunderstorms connect electrically with the upper atmosphere. NASA’s Spritacular citizen science project, launched in 2022, now collects sprite photographs from the public, including from photographers and pilots who happen to be in the right place.

Can You See a Sprite From an Aircraft?

Yes, under the right conditions. You need a dark night, a large and very active thunderstorm some distance away, so that you are looking at the sky above it rather than into the cloud, and patience, because a sprite lasts only a few hundredths of a second. Many of the people who saw them first were sitting in a cockpit, and some still are.

Sources: NASA press release on the Sprites94 aircraft campaign (July 1994); NASA Earthdata, “The role of the Space Shuttle videotapes in the discovery of sprites, jets and elves”; Smithsonian magazine on Nichole Ayers’ sprite photograph (2025); Space.com; ESA Thor experiment; NASA image archive.