Astronauts share images of mysterious luminous events on earth from the International Space Station.

Astronaut Thomas Pesquet recorded an extremely rare event in the photo taken from the International Space Station on June 8th/kloc-0. The following photo clearly shows a bright blue-and-white luminous event on the horizon of the earth. Pesque took a single-frame photo, showing a blue luminous event of long time delay photography.

Although this photo looks like some kind of explosion, it is not. Most people on the ground may never notice this event. What Pesque captured was called an "instantaneous luminous event", which was similar to lightning, but hit upward in the upper atmosphere of the earth. Another name for this phenomenon is lightning in the upper atmosphere.

Instantaneous luminous events are a group of related phenomena, which usually occur during thunderstorms. Although similar to lightning, they occur higher than ordinary lightning and work in different ways. Different types of events that belong to the category of transient luminous events include "blue jets" in the lower stratosphere caused by lightning. For such an event to occur, lightning must pass through the negatively charged area of the thunderstorm cloud and then reach the positively charged area below.

If this happens, lightning will hit upwards, causing molecular nitrogen to emit blue light. There is also a phenomenon called the red elf. Red elves are usually red discharges, which occur at the height of thunderstorm units and are triggered by lightning below. Interestingly, scientists didn't believe in them decades ago.

Before the scientific community agreed that this phenomenon existed, the upper pilots had observed it. Today, we know that there are not only transit luminous events on the earth, but also they affect the climate. It is not clear what kind of events we saw in the photos taken by Pesque on the International Space Station. It is worth noting that this type of phenomenon is difficult to capture in photos on the ground.