A night watching Red sprites under galaxies
On the 11th October 2025, I set out to photograph the Milky Way from the Clay Cliffs near Ōmārama, a small town on the edge of New Zealand’s Mackenzie Basin. The Mackenzie Basin is a part of a world-recognised dark-sky area: the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. The lack of light pollution, the fairly arid climate, the Southern Hemisphere night sky, and the wide, open horizons make it one of the best places on Earth for night-sky photography.
It was a night that was not expected to deliver well for astrophotography with clouds covering all the forecasts, yet a windless, calm night with surprise phenomena was ahead for us! I had two friends with me, visiting photographers José Cantabrana and Dan Zafra. Our plan was simple: capture the spring Milky Way setting for the season under some of the best skies on earth, before it disappeared for the year.
As we began capturing our first astro photos, we noticed a lightning storm on the horizon very far away from us, on the West Coast. We were east of the main dividing mountain range (New Zealand’s Southern Alps that separates the East and West Coast rivers) looking across toward the mountains and West Coast. Lightning flickered behind the mountains almost a hundred kilometres away. We kept shooting the Milky Way as normal, watching the storm occasionally light up the sky. With this interesting combination of clear skies and lightning flashes, José brought up the possibility of capturing a rare, mysterious, and elusive phenomenon called red sprites or red lightning in layman’s terms. I had heard of them before and taken great interest, but knew the odds of capturing them was extremely low, and all of us had no idea about the technicality of capturing them in a photo. We continued our shoot without thinking more, rather pleased with the clear sky and faint aurora to the South. I was photographing a familiar subject for me and ended up being gifted with something far rarer that incredible evening!
It all began with an accidental capture, and a whole bunch of yelling and excitement was let into the dark. I could not believe my eyes, or how lucky it was to unintentionally capture one with the Milky Way. After knowing it was possible, my focus shifted purely toward trying to capture the Sprites and to fulfil a longtime dream of mine, having been passionate about storms from a young age. I took a sequence of 30s exposures to allow myself the best opportunity. I then remember telling José, “imagine if you saw one with your own eyes”, and within a couple of seconds, I saw a deep crimson sprite flash in the sky. There it was - I had seen my first red sprite with my naked eye, and I knew my long exposure had just started! It is very special to have an image of the red sprite I saw in person, and it’s one I’ll cherish forever. To Quote the Guardian: “Observing the phenomena was a dream for Rae, an award-winning nightscape photographer. “It looks like you’re seeing something that isn’t real; it’s very ethereal… it’s this very deep red colour that’s there for a fraction of a second, so it’s really interesting to see.””
So, what are Red Sprites?
Sprites are rare electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorms, in a high region of the atmosphere known as the mesosphere, between about 50 and 90 kilometres above the ground toward the edge of space. Unlike normal lightning, which travels downward, sprites shoot upward toward space. They are triggered by powerful positive lightning strikes on the ground, and last for just a few milliseconds, too brief for most people to ever see. They were first recorded only in the recent year of 1989, and while scientists have since documented them using high-speed cameras and aircraft, they remain difficult to capture from the ground - let alone from New Zealand. The red colour comes from excited nitrogen molecules in the thin upper atmosphere. Sprites often appear as branching columns or jellyfish like shapes, sometimes spanning tens of kilometres in height. Because they occur above distant storms and are so brief, they require both luck and preparation to record.
In New Zealand, sightings are especially rare, and that’s what makes this image particularly special. New Zealand’s storms are often smaller and shorter lived, and their skies while dark, very rarely line up with the precise conditions needed for sprites to appear clearly. Red sprite captures require a very powerful thunderstorm on the horizon, perfectly clear skies above, and just the right distance between the two. I know only a handful of red sprite images have ever come out of New Zealand, and to my knowledge, this is one of the first instances of red sprites captured over New Zealand in the same frame as the Southern Milky Way.
Technically, the process was straightforward for me: wide lens, high ISO, continuous exposure sequence, combined with my normal night scape process of tracking the sky for detail, and combining an untracked foreground of the same alignment. Unlike the Milky Way, sprites are unpredictable. You can prepare all you like, but you must also be lucky. When I saw that faint red flash, I knew I had witnessed something few ever have in New Zealand.
The resulting image is both scientifically interesting and personal. It speaks about the rare and unexpected surprises that come with astrophotography. It is also a reminder of what New Zealand can offer to those who look upward — vast skies, wild landscapes and always the possibility of witnessing something extraordinary. You have to be out there to catch the unexpected!
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