Space & Astronomy

Image shows huge lightning jet towering 50 miles above New Orleans

By T.K. Randall
March 5, 2025

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) While most people will have witnessed a bolt of lightning forking across the sky during a thunderstorm, electrical discharges in the atmosphere can also take other, much rarer forms.

Ball lightning, which manifests as a floating orb of crackling electricity that can move silently through the air (and even sometimes into people's houses), is one such example.

Jet lightning, meanwhile, happens when lightning shoots upward away from the ground rather than toward it.

One particularly impressive example of this was captured on camera by one of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station back in November.The image shows a huge towering lightning jet reaching 50 miles into the sky above what is believed to be the coast of New Orleans.

Jets like these, generally referred to as transient luminous events (TLEs), occur when the charged layers of the clouds are temporarily inverted, causing the lightning to shoot up instead of down.

Some of these jets can be particularly energetic - exceeding 60 times the power of a normal bolt.

The phenomenon was only recently discovered back in 2001 and only a few examples have ever been caught on camera.

Scientists now believe that up to 1,000 of them could occur every year.

Source: Live Science

Tags: Lightning