neom 4 days ago

Cool TLE photo from an astronaut couple days ago: https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563

  • cs702 a day ago

    Just, wow.

    I've never seen anything like that.

    Thank you for sharing it on HN!

    • lbeckman314 a day ago

      We're spoiled in terms of cool astronauts! A couple of personal favorite posts:

      1. Jonny Kim: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKkj52PuO6h/

      > My first time-lapse. Thanks to some instruction and tips from @Astro_Ayers, I caught my first aurora. After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing. Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked. Thanks, Vapor!

      ———

      2. Don Petit: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xbmhz4/i_captured_so...

      > These are Star Trails taken from my previous mission to the ISS, Expedition 30, in 2012. I call it "Lightning Bugs."... In the photo, stars make arcing trails in deep space, while a huge thunderstorm pounds Earth below as seen from the time history of lightning flashes.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20250215124004/https://blogs.nas...

  • jekwoooooe 16 hours ago

    Please don’t post direct links to twitter. When they do work(which is rare) it supports that egomaniac

    • falleng0d 13 hours ago

      Oh yes, let's everyone stop posting links to twitter because someone disagrees with the political views of the owner. So much for having some tolerance right?

      please keep this kind of rhetoric to reddit

      • autoexec 5 hours ago

        I've wished people stopped posting links to twitter the moment twitter started requiring people to create/log into an account in order to view anything. I think the political concerns are every bit as valid as concerns over accessibility and privacy, but ultimately there are a lot of good reasons to avoid linking to twitter.

      • vintagedave 12 hours ago

        In all seriousness, drawing a line once we reach Nazis is absolutely fair. That is not something to tolerate.

      • jekwoooooe 6 hours ago

        Triggered much? I’m expressing my free speech by refusing to use his neo nazi website and encouraging others to avoid it too. Why do I have to tolerate him?

      • tristramb 10 hours ago

        There are some things that you should not be tolerated. Greedy, manipulative, lying bullies are one of those things.

    • gosub100 9 hours ago

      Please don't partake in virtue signalling. It makes you feel like you're making a difference, allows you to signal to your tribe that you feel a certain way (gaining you virtue among them), but requires 0 actual effort.

      • vintagedave 8 hours ago

        It's not virtue signalling: it's a concrete action. Refusing traffic from an audience like Hacker News is meaningful. Any boycott is meaningful.

        It is also the opposite of silence. Someone speaking up and saying, 'This is not okay and we should not do it', as the OP did, is important.

        • gosub100 38 minutes ago

          It's not a boycott if you are the product.

      • jekwoooooe 6 hours ago

        Refusing to use a platform is literally the opposite of virtue signaling

        • kbelder 2 hours ago

          Refusing to use a platform is a concrete action. A post complaining about other people using that platform is bit performative and a bit rude.

jacobevelyn a day ago

I expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

  • donatj 10 hours ago

    I am a huge skeptic in general, but when I was 18 some twenty+ years ago I was sitting in my parents living room during a thunderstorm watching out the back window.

    This blaringly loud blindingly bright ball of white light just meandered slowly towards the house, before striking the house and destroying most of our electronics and starting a small fire.

    The noise was the most impressing part. It's difficult sound to fully explain, it sounded a lot like when a high power line fell near my house a couple years ago. Imagine you were an ant inside a running blender, it's that all-encompassing.

    I will never forget it, I've never seen anything like it.

    • nancyminusone 8 hours ago

      My mother claims to have seen ball lightning. I was there too, but facing away from the window at the time. Sounded like regular lightning to me.

      I asked her about this recently, but she doesn't remember.

  • wrp 6 hours ago

    It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."

  • JKCalhoun 19 hours ago

    Came up on my feed a few days ago. Looks like convincing ball lightning to me: https://youtu.be/mmOfwFHBu_o

    • spyder 8 hours ago

      It's likely an arcing powerline (see the reddit comments): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1lrk1rz/incredible_...

      • MisterTea 8 hours ago

        Reading through the comments and reviewing the video does indeed point to arcing power lines. Ive seen videos of fast moving arcs across medium voltage lines that looked like a horizontal jacobs ladder. The lines over current protection equipment might not instantly trip as the current might be limited by enough impedance in the equipment. Disappointing reveal.

      • JKCalhoun 7 hours ago

        That sounds plausible.

    • omnibrain 13 hours ago

      Just a few days ago, when those sprite pictures and videos first made their rounds, I thought about ball lightnings. Back in the 90ies I had a physics teacher that was obsessed with them because he saw one as a child.

      I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now, but I found almost nothing.

      • hermitcrab 13 hours ago

        >I figured, with the advent of cameras everywhere we would have much more evidence of them by now

        The prevalence of phone cameras in the modern world has shown that:

        -Bigfoot doesn't exist.

        -Police brutality does.

      • JKCalhoun 7 hours ago

        There must be a relevant xkcd....

    • MisterTea 10 hours ago

      The Doom plasma rifle and BFG no longer appear completely fictional.

    • alberth 18 hours ago

      What’s odd about that video for me is, why didn’t the person zoom in (on the lightning ball)?

      Seems like human nature would be to zoom in on something of interest.

      • JKCalhoun 18 hours ago

        Cell phone with no zoom?

        The convincing bit to me is the few frames you see when the ball "collapses".

      • deepsun 18 hours ago

        They do at 0:25

HK-NC 5 hours ago

Ive seen the blue sprites while in the mountains above the clouds. If you open an image editor, black background, select paintbrush, electric blue colour, and do a random fast squiggle followed by ctrl+z thats how they look. I only say this because images and video seem to not exist for them yet. Looks like a signature on the sky.

neuroelectron 21 hours ago

The curious phenomena of red sprites, green ghosts and blue jets are clearly derived from the red, green and blue pixels of the simulation aether.

  • Terr_ 20 hours ago

    Nah, the aether doesn't care, we just see them that way because there's a bug preventing the effect from triggering all simulated retinal cones. :p

the_arun 4 days ago

NG forces people to enter email address without a close button.

  • dylan604 18 hours ago

    Dev tools, pick element, set display:none. It’s your browser. You can choose what it does

  • n1b0m a day ago

    I was able to close it

mock-possum 4 days ago

> Not only did the photographers capture a significant number of red sprites, the Himalayan storm also featured even rarer TLEs called jets and ghosts. The team found 16 secondary jets, powerful columns of often blue or purple light darting upwards into the sky, and at least four ghosts, green hazy glows that can sometimes hover above red sprites.

Oddly we will just have to take the author’s word for it, because no photographs depicting those rarer TLEs appear in this article.

adolph a day ago

The article links to a photographer of the phenomena which arguably has better info than the article.

https://paulmsmithphotography.com/pages/what-are-red-sprites...

  Sprites get their characteristic red color from excitation of nitrogen in 
  the low pressure environment of the upper mesosphere. At such low 
  pressures quenching by atomic oxygen is much faster than that of 
  nitrogen, allowing for nitrogen emissions to dominate despite no 
  difference in composition. As the atmospheric pressure increases in the 
  lower atmosphere, the red emissions are quenched and blue emissions from 
  atmospheric nitrogen excitation dominate. . .
foxglacier a day ago

The trouble with fancy photography (which National Geographic is famous for) is it can make things look far more spectacular or "otherworldly" than real life. Apparently this lightning can't usually be seen by people, occur above the clouds, and in the blink of an eye. You could be looking right at it and not notice anything otherworldly. Well that's not impressive. You can also see otherworldly things just by watching water move up close or looking at space through a telescope, or using an instrument to visualize EM fields or whatever. I expect those things to be otherworldly because they are.

  • dfedbeef a day ago

    I think it's ok to think they're all interesting

    • alwa 17 hours ago

      For that matter I think a large part of what makes anything “otherworldly” is beauty in things unfolding outside our normal experience of the world: I don’t see what distinguishes glorious NG photography from the other methods. It’s only natural to expect that from techniques that let us access phenomena that wouldn’t be perceptible in terms of ordinary human scale or sense of time

TheAceOfHearts a day ago

No mention of ball lightning [0]? I also keep feeling incredibly disappointed that some Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.

Although as I was just looking up the ball lightning link it turns out there was a newly reported recording of ball lightning just a few days ago [1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/11272805/alberta-storm-lightning-...

  • MisterTea 8 hours ago

    > Chinese researchers have had video going back to 2014 but, AFAIK, it has never been published.

    There is this video which shows the shape on the left and spectral image on the right: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/5