The fantastic Red Sprites night

As the stormy summer weather over the central Europe is underway, there are many chances to capture the Red Sprites again. I took my camera on the beach of the Seč reservoir late night on 17 July 2015, knowing the strong MCS storm is moving across the central Austria, so about 300-400 km south from my site. I was not optimistic because of the distance of the storm, and the light pollution in that direction as well. I started to capture the southern horizon casually with my 24mm lenses and after a 10 minutes I saw just by my eyes bright and short flash in the starry sky close to the Milky Way. There was no doubt about Red Sprite and the picture just proved it. When other strong flash of Sprite occurred, I removed my lenses immediately, using Pentacon 135mm, f2.8, and tried to focus it in the spot of the sky, where I saw the last Sprites. In that time I started to do very short exposures continually and in half of an hour I captured about “blind” 500 images. But on 14 of those shots there were captured the amazing phenomena! Such incredibly lucky guess! The most beautiful TLE phenomena are in this mosaic. Used Canon 6D Baader IR Mod; for wide image Samyang 24 mm, f2.0, ISO 4000, 8s exposure; for detailed TLE views Pentacon 135 mm, f2.8, ISO 4000, 4s exposures; tripod.

The image is available in higher resolution (4300x2144px, 300dpi, 17MB): The fantastic Red Sprites night – full.