A mysterious green flash has bewildered an astronaut currently orbiting earth.
Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick set up a timelapse to capture extraordinary footage of Earth from over North Africa, but when he reviewed the footage he discovered something out-of-this-world… literally. Take a look:
The footage shows brilliant ‘paparazzi-like’ lights flicker across the continent, which are actually lightning storms – and they can be seen from space pretty much around the clock.
A bit of trivia for you, according to the Met Office, the UK’s national weather and climate service, thunderstorms are much more common than you’d think.
It wrote: “Thunderstorms are common occurrences on Earth. It is estimated that a lightning strike hits somewhere on the Earth’s surface approximately 44 times every second, a total of nearly 1.4 billion lightning strikes every year.”
So by the time you finish brushing your teeth – two minutes if you’re doing them right – lightning would have struck the ground somewhere on the planet more than 5,000 times.
The mysterious green flash starts to build in the timelapse (Twitter/@dominickmatthew)
But it wasn’t the storms that sparked the NASA astronaut’s curiosity, but a bolide.
Taking to Twitter, he wrote: “I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere – a rather bright one called a bolide.
“Timelapse is slowed down to one frame per second for you to see it streaking and then exploding.”
A bolide is an extremely bright meteor that explodes when it breaks into our planet’s atmosphere.
He continued: “Timelapse was setup over Northern Africa where it was very dark with lightning. I got greedy with ISO (25600) and when the timelapse got to Cairo the cities were overexposed.
It builds into a brilliant flash of light (Twitter/@dominickmatthew)
“I was greedy because I wanted the Milky Way Core. When I went to review the shots afterwards I found the bolide.”
He went on: “For those asking about date and time for meteor tracking: The meteor exploded on 2 Sept 2024 at 20:12:20 GMT based on the clock in the camera which may be off by 30s or so either side.”
In both recordings you can see the meteor hurtling towards Earth, before breaking through the planet’s atmosphere – at which point it bursts into flames over over Cairo, the capital city of Egypt.
The astronaut, who is part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission which saw him launch to the ISS in March, took to the social media platform to ask users: “If you know about these type of meteors please chime in. I am curious to know more.”