Sprites are red lightning-like electrical discharges that dance near the edge of space. They’re more elusive than conventional lightning bolts, but they can be spotted in dark skies if the sky is clear. The Subaru-Asahi Star Camera, a 24/7 live stream of the night sky above Hawai’i, captured a rare sighting of red sprites dancing in the sky on February 4-5. These sprites aren’t the first time that these exotic lights have been caught on camera, but they’re the most recent.

Sprites are a type of lightning

If you’ve ever seen a flash of lightning and then something else – high above the storm – you’ve witnessed a phenomenon known as a sprite. It’s one of the least-understood electrical phenomena in Earth’s upper atmosphere, but it could be a big breakthrough for scientists.

Sprites, which are also known as transient luminous events (TLEs), often form in thunderstorms. They can take a variety of shapes, ranging from diffuse plumes to bright, spiny tendrils.

To see sprites, you need to look for them during a thunderstorm that produces lots of positive lightning strikes. You can find these storms during spring and summer in places where there isn’t much light pollution that could wash them out.

They’re shaped like jellyfish

In the sky above thunderstorms, a type of electrical flash that looks like jellyfish with tentacles streaming down has been spotted for decades. They’re dubbed red sprites by atmospheric scientists, and they’re one of a variety of transient luminous events (TLEs), which are brief flashes of light that dance across the upper atmosphere.

They’re triggered by intense lightning strikes in the lower part of the atmosphere. But while most cloud-to-ground lightning has a negative electric charge, there’s also a rare form called positive lightning, which has a positively charged jolt of electricity.

When lightning hits the apex of a cloud, the negative charge is separated from the positive charge, and the latter floats up to the ionosphere. This can cause plasma irregularities to appear, resulting in the sprites’ bluish glow and reddish-orange flashes.

They’re elusive

Sprites are a type of TLE, or thermal lightning discharge, that occurs high above thunderstorm clouds. They can appear as luminous reddish-orange flashes that flicker in the sky.

They can last from 5 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds and are caused by positive lightning discharges between a cloud and the ground.

But they can be elusive to photograph because they occur so high in the atmosphere and are usually obscured by the cloud’s light. This is why scientists have been studying them for years.

Researchers have compared sprites to another type of TLE called streamers, which are needle-thin plasma filaments that form when gas mixtures at ground pressure are subjected to electric fields. They found that streamers also have submillimeter diameters, a clue that they could have a similar chemical makeup to sprites.

They’re triggered by thunderstorms

Unlike other types of lightning, sprites are usually triggered by positive discharges above thunderstorm clouds. They are also a rare and beautiful sight.

They are often hard to spot from the ground, though they can be seen in high-resolution satellite imagery. Their enigmatic nature makes them a prime target for scientific observation.

The best sprites are found in the most remote parts of the world, which is why they are often captured on film by scientists who are willing to spend their nights in the skies. They can be tricky to catch, and a dark sky free of light pollution is key.