Tranquility Under Busy Skies
by Ralf Rohner
Title
Tranquility Under Busy Skies
Artist
Ralf Rohner
Medium
Photograph
Description
A very tranquil campsite under the starry skies of the Swiss Alp, but make no mistake: there is quite some action in the sky.
While Milky Way is moving majestetically through the night and the planets Saturn and Mars follow it, a high atmosperic phenomenon called red sprite, is making a fleeting appearance.
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are usually triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground.
Sprites appear as luminous reddish flashes. They often occur in clusters above the troposphere at an altitude range of 50–90 km (31–56 mi). Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886, but they were first photographed on July 6, 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota.
Sprites are sometimes inaccurately called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, sprites are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric lightning, so they are more akin to fluorescent tube discharges than to lightning discharges.
Uploaded
July 20th, 2018
Statistics
Viewed 441 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/24/2024 at 10:23 PM
Embed
Share
Sales Sheet
Similar Images
Comments (1)
Allan Van Gasbeck
Congratulations! Your outstanding artwork has been chosen as a FEATURE in the “Long Exposure and Night Photography ” group on Fine Art America — You are invited to post your featured image to the featured image discussion thread as a permanent place to continue to get exposure even after the image is no longer on the Home Page.
Recently Viewed
