Spectacular red sprites - ultrafast bursts of electricity - filmed over the Urals

‘I was particularly impressed by the threadlike structures with clusters of bright dots going down to the thunderclouds’, Ilya Yankovsky said 

Ilya, 27, from the town of Irbit in the Ural region used high-speed photography to catch red sprites during nighttime thunderstorms. 

Usually sprites flicker so fast that they are barely visible to a naked eye. 

‘The abundance of nighttime thunderstorms in the Urals this summer allowed me to successfully test a new technique using high-speed photography, thanks to which I was able to capture this rare phenomenon in great detail’, he said.

‘I was particularly impressed by the threadlike structures with clusters of bright dots going down to the thunderclouds’, he said in comment to the video.

The astronomer put together the impressive results of his several months long hunt for red sprites, and slowed down parts of the footage to show the ‘birth’ of firework-like electric bursts in the sky.

He said he was really lucky as the summer 2020 was unusually - for the Ural region-  rich for thunderstorms.

Pictures and video of the red sprites by Ilya Yankovsky