Christchurch photographer Tom Rae has spoken of the “very difficult” set of conditions that needed to come together to help capture a picture of rare red sprites in the sky above the South Island.
Rae, along with two other international photographers, set out to shoot the Milky Way over the Ōmārama Clay cliffs in McKenzie International Dark Sky reserve on October 11 when they snapped the crimson flashes.
Red sprites — also known as red lightning — are large, brief flashes of red light that occur in the upper atmosphere, 50-90km above strong thunderstorms.
Rae told Breakfast they were “one of Earth’s most mysterious atmospheric phenomena”.
“An electrical discharge similar to lightning, but unlike regular lightning that strikes downward from clouds and hits the ground, red sprite shoot upward towards the edge of space,” he explained.
“They are a beautiful red colour, I can confirm, because I managed to see one with my eye,” he laughed.
He said to snap a picture like this was “a game of luck and patience”.
“Obviously a camera captures a wide field of view, so I set my camera up in the rough direction that I knew that they were going to be. And then, yeah, I just managed to be looking straight at one when it happened. And got lucky, they only last for literally a few milliseconds, just like lightning.”
‘Extremely difficult conditions to line up’
Asked if anyone would be able to go outside and see the red lightning, Rae said that would be “very difficult” to get the precise conditions and timing correct.
“The conditions that you actually need to capture red sprites are extremely difficult conditions to line up.
“So here in New Zealand, we don’t typically get very, very powerful thunderstorms, and it’s really these very powerful thunderstorms, [with] extremely powerful lightning strikes, that are known to cause this elusive phenomenon of a red sprite.
“Combined with that, you need to have clear skies, being able to see above the storm, and then also the storm has to be at the right distance. So very few people have captured red sprites in New Zealand.”
Rae said it was very meaningful and “amazing” to have captured it, and to have seen it with his own eyes.
“It’s just kind of a testament to astrophotography. For me, astro has just completely changed my life as a hobby, and it’s opened so many doors, and now it’s a profession.
“I was very lucky, because the actual sprite that I managed to see with my eye was the one that I caught on the image. So for me, that image is like, yeah, very, very meaningful to me.”
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