NASA Astronaut and pilot Nichole Ayers captured a photo of this rare blue and red flash of light as it shot upwards from a powerful thunderstorm over the Coahuila region of northern Mexico. This is known as a gigantic jet, a rare form of transient luminous event that can appear as a momentary streak of lightning shooting up into the atmosphere way above from a particularly powerful thunderstorm. Gigantic jets reach into the ionosphere, to altitudes of around 55 miles (90 km). 

The physics of these fleeting upper-atmospheric electrical discharges is still a little unclear. It appears they are initiated by lightning travelling within a huge Cumulonimbus storm cloud below from a region of negative charge in its middle to one of positive charge up at its top. Before the redistribution of charge within the cloud completes, a negatively charged streak escapes upward from the cloud toward the ionosphere, forming a 45-mile-long (75 km) jet of blue light branching out in filaments of red.

Gigantic jets are just one of a range of different transient luminous events that can occur over thunderstorms, with exotic names like sprites, ELVES, TROLLs, and pixies. First discovered in the early 2000s, gigantic jets are some of the rarer ones. And because they happen way above thunderstorms, they’re not the sort of thing most of us will ever see. Thankfully, Major Ayers had the perfect vantage point in the ISS. She also knew just what she was looking for, filming the storms below with a very high-speed time-lapse camera. It typically takes about 2000-5000 images of a storm to get one that coincides with a transient luminous event like this. The gigantic jet only lasts a little over 200 milliseconds, so you could miss it in the blink of an astronaut’s eye.