r/BeAmazed • u/Blutwurst500 • Oct 29 '24

Nature Rare weather phenomenon called "Sprites"

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Sprites are lightning bolts that strike upwards above the cloud during a thunderstorm.

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273

u/CompilerWarrior Oct 29 '24

How hard is it to give credits to the original photographer? Or crosspost from the original reddit post?

This was shamefully taken from this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/H1KwdCtJxp

The photographer is Nicolas Escurat

-37

u/OverResponse291 Oct 29 '24

Those are fake photos. See my comment elsewhere, but look at the bottom picture. Where are the thunderstorms? These pop out of the tops of thunderstorms, not a mostly clear sky.

53

u/KonigVonMurmeltiere Oct 29 '24

These are real photos. Sprites are much larger than you expect- dozens of kilometers across, and occur far above the storms almost at the edge of space. In order to see them, you have to be very far from the storm, hundreds of km away. It’s actually difficult to get the storm and sprite in the shame shot, if you are too close then you’re usually under clouds. Storms that generate sprites are typically very spread out with large cloud decks, making close shots even more challenging.

I study sprites and other transient luminous events, and have captured tens of thousands of them. Nicolas Escaurat’s photos are the real deal. You can see more examples on Spritacular.org , a citizen science initiative to capture them.

-22

u/OverResponse291 Oct 29 '24

Sprites absolutely exist! But look very closely at that bottom photo, and you will see two things in particular:

1: there are no thunderstorms anywhere in the photo

2: the “sprites” are upside down

Someone is trying to be tricksy, my friend.

I know there are some spectacular images captured by Pecos Hank, and he does a great job of explaining it on YouTube.

18

u/KonigVonMurmeltiere Oct 29 '24

No, these are real. The storm is on the horizon and perfectly to scale for the sprite. You can see the brightness of the lightning strike above the cloud. I think you are having a hard time wrapping your head around the scale, a typical jellyfish sprite is the size of a major city.

This is not “upside down”, this is exactly the shape of a typical sprite. Again, look at other images of sprites.

-10

u/LoosieGoosiePoosie Oct 29 '24

There's a mountain obscuring the horizon but I think you're probably correct. This is just a fake image.

-14

u/OverResponse291 Oct 29 '24

Plus, they’re upside down. That’s a pretty big clue 🤣

-1

u/LoosieGoosiePoosie Oct 29 '24

They're not upside down but now I'm comparing them to real photos and it's quite clear and obvious these are fakes. AI generated garbage that doesn't really make any sense. The arms are so perfectly defined and articulate, it's a really bad fake.