In today's image, we see large jets of lightning reaching upward from the storm clouds in the distance into Earth's ionosphere. The tops of these bear a resemblance to the red sprites we have looked at in previous images. This rare lightning is less understood than the more common cloud to cloud to cloud to ground lightning.

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This Podcast is an authorized New Media Mirror Site for APOD. You can access the image and website directly at: Astronomy Picture of the Day. You can use the archive link below the image to select the photo corresponding to the date of this podcast.

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