Our very own pareidolia

Christians merely get Jesus on pita bread or Madonna's on plate glass windows — we get squid-shaped lightning, which is obviously much more impressive.

i-f5bf56a116d5a68377915cfce0c99886-squid_lightning.jpeg

Alas, no magic squid in the sky for us, though — these are entirely natural phenomena.

"Sprites are a true space weather phenomenon," he adds. "They develop in mid-air around 80 km altitude, growing in both directions, first down, then up. This happens when a fierce lightning bolt draws lots of charge from a cloud near Earth's surface. Electric fields [shoot] to the top of Earth's atmosphere--and the result is a sprite. The entire process takes about 20 milliseconds."

Tags

More like this

"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen." -Larry Niven Here on the solid ground of the Earth, the Sun and Moon rise and set on a daily basis. During the hours where the Sun is invisible, blocked by the solid Earth, the stars twirl overhead in the…
Global Warming is the increase in the Earth's temperature owing to the greenhouse effects of the release of CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere, mainly by humans burning fossil fuel, but also by the release of Methane from oil wells and melting of Arctic permafrost, natural gas from leaky…
A repost: In a paper that is about to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers Andrew Heymsfield, Patrick Kennedy, Steve Massie, Crl Schmitt, Zhien Wang, Samuel Haimov and Art Rangno make the claim that "The production of holes and channels in altocumulus…
In a paper that is about to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers Andrew Heymsfield, Patrick Kennedy, Steve Massie, Crl Schmitt, Zhien Wang, Samuel Haimov and Art Rangno make the claim that "The production of holes and channels in altocumulus clouds by two…