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GIGANTIC JETS: Think of them as sprites on steroids: Gigantic Jets are lightning-like discharges that spring from the top of thunderstorms, reaching all the way from the thunderhead to the ionosphere 90 km overhead. They're enormous and powerful.

You've never seen one? "Gigantic Jets are very rare," explains atmospheric scientist and Jet-expert Oscar van der Velde of the Université Paul Sabatier's Laboratoire d’Aérologie in Toulouse, France. "The first one was discovered in 1992 by Dr. Victor Pasko in Puerto Rico, and since then only 10 jets have been photographed over land."

Make that 12. On Aug. 20th, Richard Smedley of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, was hunting for meteors using a low light video camera when he caught two Gigantic Jets instead:


Click on the image to view the 4.5 MB video

To appreciate how large they are, consider the following: "The Jets were coming from a thunderstorm 300 miles away in Missouri," says Smedley: map.

Because they connect thunderstorms directly to the ionosphere, Gigantic Jets play some role in the global flow of electricity around our planet, but how big is that role? "No one knows," says van der Velde. "This is cutting-edge research and these photos from Oklahoma provide an exciting new case-study."

Amateur astronomers, you may be able to contibute to this research. Check your local weather radar map for storms just over the horizon, point your meteor cameras in that direction, and click. Gigantic Jets may turn out to be not so rare, after all.