NASA flight engineer Nichole “Vapor” Ayers captured one of the clearest images to date of an upper-atmospheric lightning discharge while the International Space Station (ISS) passed over Mexico and the southern United States on 3 July. The red, tree-shaped flash—a rare “sprite” or possibly a larger “gigantic jet”—was photographed from roughly 250 miles above Earth and shared by Ayers soon after the overflight. Sprites are a class of Transient Luminous Events that erupt 50 km to 100 km above powerful thunderstorms when intense cloud-to-ground lightning alters the electric field high in the atmosphere. They last only milliseconds and are almost impossible to observe from the ground; NOAA says direct visual records remain scarce more than three decades after the phenomenon was first confirmed. The high-resolution image is expected to aid research into how such discharges influence atmospheric chemistry and the global electric circuit. Ayers is serving on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission, which launched in March and is scheduled to remain on orbit into August, giving scientists additional opportunities to document lightning-related events from the ISS.