Timelapse of the best multi-color meteor train I have ever seen, red sprites, Milky Way, and storms

As a nature lover, I'm always in complete and utter awe of the night sky. This is something about the darkness that stirs up deep contemplations like nothing else about the planet, the universe, and our place in it. The nighttime sky is also filled with some of the most incredible phenomena that can only be seen in the dark. Now, as a night sky nature photographer, I've learned you have to always be ready because things can happen fast at any time and in any direction. And if you're prepared, you can immortalize some absolutely amazing scenes. Here is a perfect example of this from just recently from a photography trip to the desert southwest by Martha in South Texas. I came down here to shoot the pristine dark night sky with storms, red sprites, and meteors, and amazing landscapes with mountains and rolling hills, yucca plants, and other cacti. A truly beautiful and serene place. On this particular night by 3am I could see so many stars and the Milky Way was like a big white cloud. I could even see a distant sprite or two firing over distant Sonora storms. And it was at this time that out of the corner of my eye, high in the sky, I noticed this bright green flash. My impulse reaction was to grab the camera and turn it in that direction. Here's what the camera captured. A stunning persistent trend from a very bright meteor. Now I'm very very fortunate to have captured dozens upon dozens of beautiful meteors before. I mean I've been out photographing the night sky for hundreds upon hundreds if not thousands of hours. And especially around meteor showers you can get some really phenomenal displays. And every once in a while you can get these really incredible anomalies that are like once-in-a-lifetime captures. But in all this time I've only seen a handful of examples of persistent trends. These persistent trends just really aren't that common. So what is a persistent meteor trend? Well my research has led me to the answer and that is, as with most other things in the upper atmosphere, we don't really know. But it is speculated and we have heavy evidence that there are three phase mechanisms involved with these persistent trends. The first phase is a short-lived one and involves main emissions coming from low excitation lines associated with metals ablated from the meteor and the green of atmospheric atoms as the atmosphere becomes superheated with the passage. And then there's a second phase that involves an afterglow with the presence of lines with higher excitation energies with thermal collisions at the temperatures thought to involve metals and like sodium catalyzing the conversion of ozone and atomic oxygen to diatomic oxygen. And the third phase is the long-lasting persistent glow thought to be an emission associated with molecules like iron oxide. Basically persistent trends are an amazing self-luminous phenomena several miles wide high in the upper atmosphere caused by self-emitting chemiluminescence mechanisms in the wake of a meteor or a big glowing cloud of vaporized metals and gases. Far more common are simple and stunning meteor trails which usually involve the striking streaks of color usually green caused by the vaporization of the metals of the meteor and the ionization of the atmosphere around it. This recent trend I caught is by far and away my favorite so far. It has multi-colors with greens, blues through silver into orange and red and the structure was just really intriguing. At the end where the trend first formed you can see this really obvious spiral effect and further down it turns to a straight line and leads into this terminal end where there's all these puffs like the excitation effect was spluttering at a lower altitude. And also just look at how crazy it is that the luminous clouds seem to pool at the one end and it almost gets brighter. So I just had to dig a little deeper to try and understand this better and I was really excited to find a recent paper from July 2024 and I'll share the link in the comments. The one thing I find really interesting that I took away from this paper is how we now understand better than ever how the morphology of these trends occur. The spirals, the puffs, the loops and the straight sections are all dictated by the upper atmospheric winds. So you have to imagine this train is cutting through different heights in the atmosphere and there are winds moving at different speeds and directions throughout its trail. So really this is giving us an amazing insight into the upper mesospheric winds that would otherwise remain unseen. And as this massive many mile wide luminous cloud warps, expands and dissipates it's almost like watching smoke in a laboratory chamber. Only the chamber here is many many miles up in the upper atmosphere with complex movement and composition throughout it. It's nature's laboratory. So you can imagine how fascinating this is for me especially being obsessed with red sprites. Here's another self-luminous phenomena in the same region of the atmosphere and it's something that's also shrouded in such mysteries as to how they're formed and how they can remain luminous for so long. And the conclusions reached from this paper are really interesting. To summarize, it's noted that these persistent trends happen in this very narrow band of the upper atmosphere in this thin layer between 93 and 85 kilometers in altitude which is actually right at the top of where red sprites occur. It's also where the green ghost can be found and very close to the airglow layer. So overall I thought this was something really unusual and it's just crazy that it's not talked about a lot because there is some importance to science here and if we can better understand these things maybe we can better understand planetary health. Because after all we're in a time in history where we're dealing with more upper atmospheric pollutants than ever before with things like rocket launches and we have this ongoing interest in the ozone layer which is right up there in the very layer where persistent trends occur. Hopefully we see more studies into these things in the near future because they are super interesting beautiful and and probably scientifically noteworthy. If you like content like this please go back and look at some of my other videos about other interesting and beautiful upper atmospheric phenomena such as red sprites, blue jets, auroras. There's really so much beauty up there and most of it is still shrouded in mystery so hopefully we can peel back the layers little by little here. My name is Paul Smith. I'm a photographer, citizen scientist, nature lover and a night sky fanatic. I'm going to keep chasing these things every opportunity I get and I donate all my work and efforts to science in hope of growing a collective knowledge. If you'd like to help support my work, help me with gear, gas or even my coffee in these long night drives, every little donation helps through the link to buy me a coffee and as a little thank you I also share exclusive content there from time to time. Thanks for watching and bye for now.