Submission + - Video reveals sprites are brighter than Venus (newscientist.com)
CarrieSmith writes: "High-quality video recordings reveal how these brief but very bright flashes tear through the upper atmosphere at 30,000 km/h. The flashes are massive — up to 50km high — and occur around the world above big thunderstorms. A researcher at the University of Alaska has captured amazing video of sprites in New Mexico using a 10,000 frames per second camera, which shows that they are made of really bright sparks that drop down through the atmsophere, followed by other brighter sparks that actually rise up dozens of kilometres and get brighter and brighter as they do — a sort of massive explosive firework. Check out the cool video embeded in: http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn1204 4-video-reveals-sprites-are-brighter-than-venus.ht ml"