Rare Red Sprite Photographed Over Yucatán Coast

A crimson flash lit up the sky above Yucatán’s coastline Saturday night — there and gone in a few milliseconds, but not before photographer Juan José Chac caught it on camera.

The image, shared on social media, shows a luminous column of red light rising from storm clouds into a star-filled sky. It quickly went viral, drawing wonder and a fair amount of disbelief from people who had never seen anything like it. The phenomenon has a name: a sprite, sometimes called a duende rojo, or red elf.

Sprites are among the stranger things the atmosphere produces. They are a type of Transient Luminous Event — large-scale electrical discharges that occur not within storms, but high above them, in the mesosphere, between roughly 50 and 90 kilometers (30 to 56 miles) above Earth’s surface. That puts them well above commercial air traffic and far above the lightning bolts they’re connected to.

The mechanism is straightforward, even if the results look otherworldly. A powerful lightning strike sends an electrical field surging upward into the thin upper atmosphere. There, it excites nitrogen molecules, which then emit a brief burst of red light. The whole event lasts just a few milliseconds. What Chac photographed — a branching red column with hints of purple near the base — is a textbook example.

The color is the physics. Nitrogen in the mesosphere glows red. Lower in the discharge, where slightly denser air creates different conditions, the tones can shift toward blue or violet.

Red Sprite Sightings

Sprites were first documented in 1989, accidentally, by researchers at the University of Minnesota who caught one on camera during a routine observation. Since then, they’ve been photographed from aircraft, from mountaintops, and from the International Space Station, where astronauts have an easier time catching them above active storm systems. NASA has even launched a public archive project called Spritacular, which collects and catalogs images submitted from around the world to help researchers better understand how they form.

Understanding sprites matters beyond the spectacle. Scientists studying them want to know how energy transfers from massive storm systems up into the ionosphere — the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere — and what role these events play in the global electrical circuit.

Despite being triggered by relatively common storm activity, sprites are rarely photographed from the ground. The combination of their brief duration, low luminosity, and the fact that most people are indoors during intense storms makes them easy to miss. Specialized astrophotographers who work with high-sensitivity cameras and long exposures, aiming toward active storm cells, give themselves the best odds — and even then, sprites often show up only when reviewing the images afterward, invisible to the eye in the moment.

Chac’s photograph stands out for its clarity and composition. The structured column, the orange-tinted base where it emerges from the cloud layer, and the purple discharges fading upward are all visible. It is the kind of image that usually requires a planned shoot with dedicated equipment. Whether this one was that or simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, the result is one of the better-documented sprite sightings over the Yucatán Peninsula in recent memory.

Sprites pose no danger. Unlike conventional lightning, which discharges between clouds and the ground, sprites occur 80 kilometers up, far removed from anything on the surface.