About 150 miles southwest of Christchurch, New Zealand, far away from the light pollution in urban centers, three photographers planned to capture the Milky Way galaxy over the clay cliffs outside Ōmārama on the night of Oct. 11.
But with an unusually big storm brewing off the west coast hundreds of miles away, they were able to spot an atmospheric phenomenon that has rarely been photographed: red sprites, sometimes called jellyfish sprites for their tentacles of otherworldly light.
The images were captured from a dark sky reserve by Tom Rae, of Christchurch, and two Spanish photographers, Dan Zafra and Jose Luis Cantabrana.
Red sprites are rarely seen outside a few regions that produce enormous storms, like the Great Plains in the United States or the vast Northeast China Plain. Even where they can be seen with some regularity, seldom do photographers capture them in sharp detail.
They are among a group of weather phenomena known as transient luminous events, electrical discharges in the atmosphere around a thunderstorm that last only a few seconds.
The sprites appear red because they happen above storms in the mesosphere, an atmospheric layer more than 30 miles above Earth’s surface. They turn blue or purple as the electrical discharge descends, much like the changing colors of aurora borealis, according to Gaopeng Lu, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China.
Professor Lu started studying transient luminous events 15 years ago in the United States, where red sprites are produced by the massive thunderstorms that form in the Great Plains. A storm has to be at least 100 kilometers wide — about 62 miles — to generate the electricity for transient luminous events, so a photographer would need to stand at least 200 kilometers from the storm’s edge to capture the sprites above the clouds, he said.
“Hardly anyone in New Zealand has captured them before because we don’t normally have storms big enough to capture them,” said Mr. Rae, the photographer.
`The images taken by Mr. Cantabrana, Mr. Rae and Mr. Zafra have been processed to bring out the sprites’ red hue. Mr. Rae said he took several shots of the sky with a long exposure, a common setting for night photography that gives his camera 30 seconds to take in light.
Unlike the glass in regular cameras, the modified models used by night sky photographers allow more light from hydrogen to reach the camera’s sensor. Stars and nebulas are made primarily of hydrogen.
After capturing the images with his hydrogen-alpha modified camera, Mr. Rae used the editing programs Photoshop and Lightroom to stack the images he captured, a process that revealed the red hues in the photos. He also used StarXTerminator, a tool powered by artificial intelligence, to make the stars less prominent in the photos, putting the sprites in starker contrast against other features in the night sky.
While A.I.-powered software can help photographers enhance their shots in post-processing, night sky photography has been plagued by the emergence of A.I.-created images.
“Manipulation is only going to get worse and harder to tell,” said Justin Mott, a photojournalist and educator based in Vietnam. “Five years ago, a time-lapse would be complicated to fake. Now A.I. can do it.”
While red sprites can be faked, those manipulated images stand out because artificial intelligence takes “jellyfish sprites” too literally, generating glowing animals instead of streaks of lightning, said Jason Weingart, a photographer based in Austin, Texas, who has captured the night sky and severe weather like tornadoes.
“Those have an overly smooth look, no grain to the image like a real photograph would have,” he said.
Mr. Rae said he had been trying to capture a sprite since he was 15. Now 20, he taught himself photography as a way to see the night sky, as cameras can reveal more features than the naked eye can see.
“I’ve always loved the night sky, ever since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s very meaningful to me, to capture an event that I’ve wanted to capture for a very long period of time.”
Francesca Regalado is a Times reporter covering breaking news.
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