SPRITES
Citizen scientist driven by the need to discover | Local News | santafenewmexican.com (October 19, 2020). Thomas Ashcraft was a speaker at the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (SARA) Western conference at the beginning of April 2021. He is an amateur astronomer near Santa Fe, NM, and he spoke with us about his work photographing sprites.
Sprites are electromagnetic discharges above very strong thunderstorms, which reach up through the Earth’s mesosphere to the ionosphere. The pulses last for a few thousandths of a second, so the eye does not easily catch them. But cameras can. These had been noticed for a while, but only got serious attention when an orbiting space crew confirmed them. Now they are a new frontier in atmospheric science.
Thomas lives in what is called the Rio Grande Research Corridor, and he exchanges data and information with institutions there. The Sandia National Labs gave him a camera, originally designed for satellites to photograph nuclear explosions, which he uses to monitor sky phenomena like sprites and meteors. He has that coupled with a receiver. With that, he has determined that sprites create similar effects on radio signals as meteor scatter. He has correlated detecting distant over-the-horizon VHF signals with sprites.
The above link is a profile about Thomas and his work from a local newspaper. It includes an 8 minute video (linked below). He also has a website: http://heliotown.com/. – Recommended by Gary Agranat WA2JQZ, April 9, 2021.