Looking Closely at Lightning from NASA ISS Earth Movie
The Net was abuzz last month about the video below, also available on Vimeo and YouTube, showing a series of time-lapses of Earth via the International Space Station, sprinkled with thunderstorms and aurora.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
But you know me -- I wasn't satisfied looking at that animation, I wanted to know what the lightning looked like in high-resolution. In our article where we discussed the video, we pointed out that you can download the individual hi-res videos and photos from NASA directly.
Because the video compresses the original high-res photos, I downloaded the "Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night" and "Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night" to get a closer look at the lightning strikes as seen from space. Above is an example of the high-resolution photo that I was "zooming into" to crop out the full-resolution lightning shot; here's the result (click to see the original high-res photo):
Pretty neat, huh? What you're looking at is a thunderstorm's "overshooting top" lighting up from lightning within.The good news is that most of the shots are crisper than the earth lights because the lightning is very quick, while the lights drag on as the earth rotates below the satellite's camera. The bad news is that the lightning generally overexposes, so you see an orb of brightness instead of a strike, though you can pick out some interesting boiling cumulonimbus cloud features. This is one of my favorites:
That's part of the ISS' solar panel in the lower right. Lightning is striking underneath the thunderstorm's "anvil." This made me wonder: Could the ISS pick up an actual lightning strike? It would almost certainly have to be what is called "cloud-to-cloud" lightning or "cloud-to-air," not the "cloud-to-ground" type we are used to seeing. At first I thought the crop below might show that, but now I believe it's an optical illusion -- you're just seeing the "silver lining" behind the thick cloud top.
Here are some other good shots. Let me know what you see in the comments below. I hope that some lightning experts can also weigh in on these photos.
