![]() The project, dubbed Spritacular and led by Burcu Kosar, will aim to help bring together photographers whose imagery of TLEs may be useful in helping understand these phenomena with scientists eager to study them. Spritacular project lead Burcu Kosar (Credit: B. Now, in order to get to the bottom of the mystery, a new NASA citizen science project is aiming to get the public involved in helping harvest new information about sprites and other similar Transient Luminous Events that have long perplexed atmospheric scientists. Today, although additional data and images have continued to be collected about sprites, like other uncommon phenomena associated with lightning, their fundamental cause remains unknown. Not all storms appear to exhibit sprites, although they have been observed in a variety of weather formations that include hurricanes. ![]() The phenomenon would subsequently become known as lightning “sprites,” a not to the ephemeral reputation of the mythical creatures from which their name is borrowed. It wasn’t until July 6, 1989, that scientists with the University of Minnesota, quite by accident, managed to capture the first known image of a largescale electrical discharge above a thunderstorm. Wilson, who decades earlier had postulated that electrical manifestations could indeed occur in the upper atmosphere. More than a century later, in 1886, scientists Joseph Toynbee and Morell Mackenzie logged a similar sighting, followed in 1956 by a possible observation by Nobel laureate C.T.R. Today, Estor’s account is recognized as the earliest known recorded observation of a variety of phenomena which are today called Transient Luminous Events, or TLEs. Making his way through the storm and onto the ridge above it, Estor was treated to a vista of blue sky above the thunderstorm, which rolled beneath him “like a white sea.” As he looked out across the storm, Estor reported observing lightning being released upward from the clouds, as well as from beneath them toward the Earth. As Estor would later write, one of his instructors had advised that he be on the lookout for what he called coelo tristi, meaning “sad heaven/sky.”Īs he later detailed in a note appearing in the second volume of his Neue Kleine Schriften, Estor traveled by horseback to the top of one of the highest mountains along the Upper Hessian Ridge, a course which brought him through a thundercloud near the mountain’s peak. ![]() In 1730, German historian and public law theorist Johann Georg Estor had been exploring the southern Rhine-Main-Area near Darmstadt, Hessen, while conducting research for a book on the geography of the region. ![]()
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