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nla
Why is there a paywall article on the front of Hacker News?
Nursie
Reading mode in Firefox worked fine for me on this one.
the_arun
NG forces people to enter email address without a close button.
n1b0m
I was able to close it
dylan604
Dev tools, pick element, set display:none. It’s your browser. You can choose what it does
mock-possum
> 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.

foxglacier
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.
adolph
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. . .
jacobevelyn
I expected ball lightning to be mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
wrp
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."
TheAceOfHearts
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
> 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

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neuroelectron
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.
HK-NC
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.