A gigantic jet caught on camera: A spritacular moment for NASA astronaut

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/a-gigantic-jet-caught-on-camera-a-spritacular-moment-for-nasa-astronaut-nicole-ayers/

by acossta • 11 months ago

395 89 11 months ago

science.nasa.gov

ericwood• 11 months ago

All of this and the only image linked is a collage clocking in at a whopping 512x218px...anyone know where we can see the full resolution? It looks spectacular from the thumbnail!

diggernet• 11 months ago

Yeah, annoying.

This one is better:

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2025/07/Nichole-Ayers-S...

the_arun• 11 months ago

These are cool too, but sprites over himalayas - https://x.com/DarshanRajguru5/status/1940829392269463943

jgord• 11 months ago

that is spectacular .. thx for link.

zoeysmithe2• 11 months ago

Imagine, say, Yuri Gagarin seeing this and coming down to explain this in 1961. The ISS is only 50 miles higher than Gagarin's flight.

arghnoname• 11 months ago

Thanks, that's a much better photo. You can really see the effects of light pollution well in that one too.

NKosmatos• 11 months ago

Looks like a scene from a sci-fi movie, where earth is being attacked ;-)

benjiro• 11 months ago

What amazes me more then the jet, is the amount of light pollution from the cities.

amelius• 11 months ago

Looks like the PR team didn't care much about the whole thing.

userbinator• 11 months ago

Took me a bit of time to realise this wasn't about spotting a plane from the ISS... which is apparently possible but difficult:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3243916/Can-...

rehevkor5• 11 months ago

+1 thought they had caught an image of a Spirit airlines plane...

baaym• 11 months ago

The image this is about: https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563

mkl3• 11 months ago

https://xcancel.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563 to see replies.

memonkey• 11 months ago

why is it red?

somat• 11 months ago

Best guess, high altitude atomic oxygen.

Based on the wikipedia aurora article it sounds like the lower atmosphere has a more mixed bag of gasses, so it glows white, while in the upper atmosphere atomic oxygen(note that oxygen lower down is all diatomic and glows green) is able to showcase it's characteristic red glow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora#Colours_and_wavelengths...

But now I am wondering about the green(oxygen?) and yellow(sodium?) atmospheric bands visable. The green one is interesting because it may tear apart my atomic oxygen theory. why would a green diatomic band be above the red atomic sprite flare?

abakker• 11 months ago

PecosHank on YouTube has a great video on TLEs and how to photograph them from the ground. I think the green is oxygen and the red is nitrogen, same as in the aurora.

throwaway290• 11 months ago

I wonder where this thunderstorm was and when!

mkl3• 11 months ago

3 July, near the border between Mexico and Texas: https://xcancel.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563

GarnetFloride2• 11 months ago

Pilot had been reporting things like that for years but nobody would believe them because they weren't "trained observers", until a pilot caught it on film in the 80's.

Same with sailors, who've been repairing rogue waves for centuries, but it wasn't until it was recorded scientifically on an oil rig that scientists took it seriously.

Still an awesome picture.

dkga• 11 months ago

In 1995 or 1997, can't remember which, I flew from Belo Horizonte to Miami (if the former) or NYC (latter). When we were flying over what I think is the Caribbean, I recall seeing "upward lightnings". They were absolutely majestic. I was absolutely awaken. I don't remember much else as I was a kid but seeing this text made me come back to this beautiful memory.

jacquesm4• 11 months ago

Upward lightnings happen frequently enough, there is a guy called Tom Warner that has done pretty extensive research into this including high speed photography.

N2yhWNXQN3k95• 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper-atmospheric_lightning

wfme• 11 months ago

In ensuing decades, high altitude electrical discharges were reported by aircraft pilots and discounted by meteorologists until the first direct visual evidence was documented in 1989.

From your link.

roughly• 11 months ago

My favorite variant of that kind of story: https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-rapto...

zoeysmithe2• 11 months ago

Classism in higher education, science, etc is sadly all too common. Even those in the 'correct' class have uphill battles as science very much is vulnerable to ego, politics, etc and reform can be difficult, or in some cases impossible, regardless of merit.

It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now due to these politics. I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things. There's just way too many stories and experiences to entirely write it off, but who knows. I feel like hand wavey excuses like third-man, carbon monoxide suddenly everywhere, thought experiments about brains releasing chemicals, calling everything a hallucination, intuition impossible to know conventionally just called luck, etc is the system trying hard to deny this.

N2yhWNXQN3k95• 11 months ago

It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now

Not really, 40% of the US believes they were created (or are descendant of) by a divine being (creationism), in spite of all evidence, so pass that hurdle first

I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.

Like 20%-66% of the US believes this today? No one is experiencing the reality you are, ever, something to keep in mind, IMO.

arethuza• 11 months ago

"Science advances one funeral at a time.”

Max Planck

joules77• 11 months ago

Reminds me. On a Greyhound cross country trip, I got seated next to this pretty, well dressed, middle aged lady, that poor college student me, hardly ever saw on such trips. We start chatting and she tells me she is a Ghost Hunter. I took her at face value due previous experiences with real freaky characters on Greyhound, and was thinking oh great here we go again, thank you Greyhound, going to be stuck for hours next to another very strange kook. That kind of put me off further conversation. Then she starts taking out her papers to read, and says - want to see something weird? Shows me all sorts of stuff about different haunted houses. And I was just blown away by how well organized and detailed everything was. Later on she told me she was a PI doing investigations for real estate companies. But for a while it felt like I was sitting next to Scully reading X-Files.

stavros• 11 months ago

If people in the "correct" class are having trouble, that means it's not entirely classism. Only the additional trouble the people in the "wrong" class have is because of classism.

graemep4• 11 months ago

I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.

Even if the experiences becomes accepted (although i think it unlikely) but not necessarily as really being what people who believe in ghosts think them to be.

it is quite common for things to turn out to be real observations but not to be what the observers thought they were (e.g. flying saucers).

tim3332• 11 months ago

Dunno if it's classism so much that if you look at reports of odd waves or lights it's going to be really hard to filter the signal from the noise of people saying odd stuff. Photos are much better.

jfjfitttjtmt• 11 months ago

I feel you are undermining the Science!

Just because some common folks think they seen something, it does not mean it exists! It was probanly gas leak explosion, or something!

moi2388• 11 months ago

You have a small typo: repairing instead of reporting

soupfordummies• 11 months ago

I saw something weird on a red-eye recently that maybe someone can explain:

We were going over a pretty rural area. I saw what looked like the fan of headlights but in these large marbleized shapes like large lightning-crackles. They just sort of moved across the ground and then fizzled out. The movement patterns would be kind of like clouds dissipating but it definitely looked like lights? Very weird.

bufbupa• 11 months ago

Something like ball lightning? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

zamadatix• 11 months ago

As Adam Savage famously said (though I'm sure he was far from the first):

  "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."

The quote is a bit of an oversimplification, i.e. "writing it down" isn't all there is to the scientific method, but the core idea something wasn't science until the scientific method was applied is both a tautology and a good thing.

mkl3• 11 months ago

Some discussion in a thread about a topically related article a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44480363

voytec• 11 months ago

depositing a significant amount of electrical charge

Unsatisfying description but I guess we don't yet know if it's any close to 1.21 jigawatts.

lfaw• 11 months ago

larger photo, with explanations: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gigantic_jet_photogr...

NoSalt• 11 months ago

What is that, an image for ants???

I absolutely cannot stand it when a site, especially a government site, doesn't post the original, high resolution, images. However, it seems like it's an archeological expedition to find the high resolution, high quality image.

frereubu• 11 months ago

For those too lazy to go digging:

https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/7498ED4A7CB57/media%2FGu8ks...

Original tweet: https://xcancel.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563

waltwalther• 11 months ago

Thank you!

bilekas• 11 months ago

Thank you, I don't think it's too unreasonable when talking about an amazing image to link to the image in the article to be fair.

th0ma5• 11 months ago

Surely X isn't the sole source for this?

js2• 11 months ago

A link to an even higher resolution image was posted hours earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937613

https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2025/07/Nichole-Ayers-S...

araes• 11 months ago

From lfaw explanation linked below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939514

"The phenomenon took place at roughly 29°N 101.5°W over Coahuila, Mexico." That's ~50 miles from the Ciudad Acuña / Del Rio border crossing with Texas.

porphyra• 11 months ago

Also all the social media links are wrong lol. I clicked on the instagram link to "nasascience" expecting to find a higher quality photo and it turned out to be some random Turkish dude with 3 posts and 1 follower.

mclau157• 11 months ago

NASA astronauts on board Expedition 44...didn't expect flashbacks like that

1970-01-01• 11 months ago

That title made me think someone snapped a picture of something like a Spirit A320 cruising at max altitude. They are bright yellow and would stand out in a photo.

adolph• 11 months ago

Previously on HN, same topic and link to Ayers' photo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44480363

Additional info about TLEs:

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

A gigantic jet caught on camera: A spritacular moment for NASA astronaut

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