SEEING SPRITES
Anecdotal accounts of lightning-like phenomena occurring above thunderstorms go back to the 19th century, but it was only in the 1950s – when red lightning was observed from airliners and tentative physical theories were described – that it entered the scientific domain. The first photograph of a sprite was taken by accident in 1989 when a team from the University of Minnesota recorded an upward flash from the cloud tops while they were testing a low-light TV camera. Over the next few years, video recordings made by astronauts on the Space Shuttle captured several more examples, placing the phenomenon on a much firmer observational footing.