Mysterious Glowing Orbs Spotted from the ISS

A NASA astronaut snapped a photo of glowing features illuminating Earth’s upper atmosphere. Though it may appear as an alien invasion threatening our planet, the blue orbs are the result of an optical phenomenon known as red sprites.

The photograph was taken by astronaut Matthew Dominick from the International Space Station (ISS) on June 3, capturing several luminous orbs lined up in a row as they occupy pockets of the atmosphere. The blue orbs were powered by a line of thunderstorms off the coast of South Africa, creating Transient Luminous Events, or bursts of energy that appear above storms due to lightning.

Aside from the spaceship-looking orbs, subtle hints of bright red flashes appear in the photograph as well. NASA describes the colorful streaks as a “less understood phenomena” associated with powerful lightning events. The red flashes appear high above the clouds in the mesosphere, the third layer of the atmosphere that’s directly above the stratosphere.

The photo offers a rare glimpse of lightning sprites, which are hard to capture from Earth. Although they’re associated with thunderstorms, sprites don’t occur in the same clouds that produce rain in the lower part of the atmosphere. Instead, the sprites appear up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) high in the sky, according to EarthSky.

NASA astronaut Dominick is gaining notoriety for sharing beautiful images captured from space during his time on board the ISS. Dominick launched to the ISS on March 3, as commander of the Crew-8 mission, and has since been delivering stunning views taken from the space station, which he shares online.

© Matthew Dominick

The ISS astronauts typically take these types of photographs from the cupola (the observatory module) or other windows on the ISS using Nikon D6 and D5 SLR cameras. NASA also uses cameras mounted outside the space station to capture a range of data.

In the case of the rare sprites, NASA put out a call to citizen scientists to send in their photos of the atmospheric phenomenon to Spritacular, a crowdsourced database that scientists can use for research. So if you happen to capture a glimpse of these bad boys, you know what to do.