Bright Jellyfish Red Sprites, Sprite Outbreak! May 23 2020. Playing with Red Sprite photography

After a failed storm chase near Goodland Kansas on May 23rd, 2020, My attention was turned toward a linear complex of storms directly to the north.

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After watching this, check out Hank's new video "Red Sprites and Jets Explained - New Discovery!" https://youtu.be/tGPQ5kzJ9Tg

My plan was to find a nice dark place in Eastern Colorado to potentially take photos of sprites over this complex. The idea is to be just far enough away to see over the top of the anvils of these storms from an area with relatively low light pollution.

Even though it wasn't yet totally dark, reports were coming into Twitter that other storm chasers were seeing red jellyfish sprites. In disbelief i pulled over to check them out for myself and met up with another nearby chaser interested in seeing them for the very first time.

Usually #sprites are quite dim, and few of them are visible to the eye, so to see them in spite of the glow of twilight meant something extraordinary must be going on. Sprites and other #TransientLuminousEvents generally occur when extremely powerful cloud-to-ground lightning is occuring inside of very vigorous thunderstorms.

Sprites can be described as simply as lightning discharges between earth and the edge of space.
Seeing and photographing them perfectly blends my interest in #astrophotography and storm chasing. And this gives me plenty of fun ideas to try out.
For example, using an extraction technique to delete everything from the scene that isn't part of the sprite event.

Here you can see the glow from the storm as it produced a mega CG, and just the sprite, and nothing else!
I had two cameras, one recording video and another taking consecutive long exposure photos. Not only can I produce a timelapse this way, i can isolate this ultra bright jellyfish sprite, plainly visible to the naked eye, even in evening twilight.

By taking images with same settings over and over. I have photos of just the twlight, the airglow, and the stars from this scene. And using a photo the contains a brilliant sprite taken just seconds later, I can then subtract this other stuff from the image that contains the sprite capture. Sprite plus stuff, minus stuff, is just the sprite itself with no other distractions. Doing so reveals incredible detail and structure.

The same technique works with both stills from a video.

And also With those consecutive images I can construct a timelapse, and with the echo effect, you can see just how many sprites I was able to capture.

I'm working with an astronomy modified Canon T3i here, and while this older camera is pretty noisy in low-light, it is also ultra sensitive to even the weakest sprite emissions.

My Canon 6D on the other hand is totally stock but has very low noise in low-light situations.

ironicaly I've been looking to capture sprites for almost 3 years now, and in just a week i've captured nearly 100 of them. I'm learning as I go, which storms to try and work with, and how best to succeed using the gear I have.
Check out this video where I modified my camera for astrophotography and sprites, or check out my storm chase footage from last week. I'll make more in depth videos about sprites in the future including some tutorials. Subscribe to this chanel to see more, thanks and I'll see you out there!
Canon T3i Sigma Art 20mm f1.4, ISO 6400. 30 fps (Should have been 24 but I forgot to fix that!)
Canon 6D Rokinon 85mm F1.4 ISO 6400 4-6s individual shots.

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