On June 27th, 2024 I positioned near New Underwood to film potential sprites above a mesoscale convective system that was moving across South Dakota. Deep into twilight, I started to pick up fleeting red columns of sprites as they periodically danced above the very active line of storms. I had one camera shooting a timelapse and another video, and I let them run for about 10 minutes before checking there exposure in the changing light. I was shocked to see the fading blue light from the sky had been replaced with the green and magenta! Aurora was showing up in my shots! I setup another camera with a wide field of view and sure enough, columns of magenta aurora were rising behind the ongoing storms. I hadn’t even looked at aurora indices but I was aware that there was a category G1 watch out for a possible CME arriving in the next 24 hours, and vaguely remembered getting an alert about possible aurora in the United Kingdom earlier.
I scrambled to adjust the cameras to capture not only sprites and lightning, but also the curtain of aurora filing the northern sky. I spent the next 3 hours watching in awe as non-stop lightning and occasional sprites danced along the horizon as meandering aurora and sparkling stars completed the canvas before me. What an experience.
Once I had a chance to look through all my images and video, I was shocked to find how sprites occurred during this event. From 0345 – 0430 UT, 2024-06-28 I recorded 86 sprites above what appeared to be the convective core of the line of storms. These were all weak sprites. After, 0430 UT I relocated to a different location and recorded sprites from 0520 – 0640 UT. During this time period I captured 14 more sprites that were much more energetic and appeared to form over the stratiform precipitation region. Below is a timelapse of just the sprites captured.
The gallery of images below are video frame captures.
