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For a split second, the night sky over northern Italy lit up in a colossal bright red ring. A photographer was in the right place at the right time.
Valter Binotto captured the eerie lightning bolt over the foothills of the Italian Alps on November 17th from his home in the small town of Possagno. The strange red ring is an “elf”, a rare and almost incredibly fast form of upper atmosphere Lightning that most people will never see.
Elves are rapidly expanding disc-shaped lightning bolts that can reach up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) in diameter and last less than a thousandth of a second. according to NOAA. They occur high above thunderstorms when a powerful electromagnetic pulse shoots upward into the ionosphere, the same ionized region of Earth’s upper atmosphere Northern lights form.
Binotto had originally planned to try photography Spritesshort electrical discharges above thunderstorms that occur in the upper atmosphere, so he focused on a thunderstorm with fewer clouds. “I didn’t catch any sprites, but luckily I managed to catch this elf!” Binotto told Space.com in an email. He used a Sony A7S with a 20mm f/1.8 lens at ISO 51,200. The photo is a frame from a video recorded at 25 fps.
“The ELVE was generated by a strong negative lightning strike in a storm in Vernazza, about 300 km south of me.” Binotto told Spaceweather.com. A lightning bolt reached an extraordinary -303 kiloamperes (the minus sign indicates the polarity of the lightning, not that the current was less than zero) and produced an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that lit up the ionosphere. For comparison: Normal lightning typically only transmits 10 to 30 kiloamperes of electricity. According to Spaceweather.com, this elf hovered about 100 miles (160 km) above Earth’s surface and was about 200 miles (320 km) in diameter.
This is not the first time Binotto has photographed the eerie phenomenon. He captured an even more dramatic elf on March 23, 2023, also from his home in Possagno. The image shows the structure in even more remarkable detail as the red halo stretched across the sky.
Editor’s note: If you take an interesting Earth or space photo and would like to share it with Space.com readers, send your photos, comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.
