SonotaCo.JP

[Lightningwizard]

Hi all,

I was able to zoom in on a carrot sprite last night with my 8-48mm f/1.2 lens. I waited for some sprites to appear and then zoomed in more and more on the place over the hills where they had appeared, hoping for the next one.
I posted a result to SpaceWeather.com, perhaps they can highlight it (not sure they will) but it is in the gallery there:
http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Oscar-van-der-Velde-z20090605_232238__LW_021s_1244289697.jpg
Click the image there to show original size. Note this is not even zoomed in all the way yet. As you see, I make some advertisement for UFOCapture (and Watec, Computar, and the time inserter... ). It was full moon so not very good conditions for still photography, and the period of sprites was not active enough.

During the same night, a huge meteor streaked across the sky at 00:50:10 UTC over northern Spain, the trail spanned from west almost to the north, orange, sparks, quite slow moving. Unfortunately it was in opposite direction of the camera which was also zoomed in at the time.

Oscar

PS. Japan and the meeting with SonotaCo was great, I am going to put some pictures in a gallery soon Still have to exchange them with Harald as well.

[SonotaCo]

Oh great! congratulations on spaceweather.com.
Complex discharge route and tendril of the carrot sprite can be seen very clearly. It is amazing .
Why so complex? ..while the column sprite looks like more simple.

Thank you for advertisement. I also enjoyed the tour with you also. ... but please do not publish my face on the net, I am so shy .

[前田]

Hi Oscar,
Congratulations for your nice shot for sprite and thank you writing this board. It is large and beautiful.
I sometimes get small sprite images during meteor obsevation.

I read interesting your tour in Akihabara written by SonotaCo in Japanese.

Kouji Maeda 　(前田）

[三本松ＨＳ天文部]

Hi Oscar,

It is a beautiful image.
Kagawa prefectural sanbonmatsu high school Astronomy club(LocationID:kagawa1) has been observing the SPRITE since January, 2007.
The observation equipment is WAT-100N, CBC8mm, and CBC6mm.
We cannot buy a new observation equipment.
Therefore, We cannot take a big image.We are investigating the Light-emitting altitud by using the image that other schools observed at the same time.

Sanbonmatsu High School
Science and mathematics course first grader
Tomiyama,Akitomo,Mori,and Nakasima

[Lightningwizard]

it made it to the front page of SpaceWeather.com!
Update: my request to the webmaster to add also a link to UFOCapture has been granted! I hope it inspires future observers

The high school project is great! It looks more effective than the campaigns of scientists. It is very important to observe with two cameras in different locations the same sprites, to find their location and altitude. This remains very difficult here in Europe, where there are fewer cameras, lots of clouds, and different storms to point at. The amount of cameras now increases here, but they need to be controlled by someone awake, and the camera systems sometimes lose connection to the web.
If you have a zoom or telephoto lens, you need more luck to capture sprites, or continuous adjustment of view like I do... but in that case, you would be too tired to follow school the next day!

Oscar