Astronaut witnesses mysterious red lights over Earth

By Dean Murray via SWNS

An astronaut has revealed he witnessed a mysterious red sprite over Earth.

NASA's Matthew Dominick captured the eerie lights above storm flashes a few days before he returned home Friday (Oct. 25).

He said of his 20 October sighting: "A red sprite shoots out above a lightning strike over Central Africa.

"I was getting set up to take images of Cairo. On the approach across Africa, there was a bunch of lightning. Out of 800 or so images, there was a red sprite!"

The phenomenon associated with thunderstorms is called a Transient Luminous Event (TLE).

TLEs takes place above thunderclouds, between 40 and 80 kilometres over the ground. Scientists estimate the size of this red sprite to be roughly 14 by 26 km.

NASA has said of TLEs: "The bright red flashes are less understood phenomena associated with powerful lightning events and appear high above the clouds in the mesosphere.

"Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), including red sprites, are colorful bursts of energy that appear above storms as a result of lightning activity occurring in and below storms on Earth."

NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, splashed down safely in their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, on Friday, completing a seven-month science mission aboard the International Space Station.