Photographs of lightning from the Space Shuttle

The equipment used in the Nighttime Daytime Optical Survey of Lightning experiment, carried out on the second and fourth Space Shuttle missions, is described. Attention is then given to one of the more spectacular lightning photographs, that of a Y-shaped discharge taken by Thomas K. Mattingly II on the night of June 29, 1982, over southern Brazil. Since the orientation of the camera with respect to the earth is not known, the scale of the photograph cannot be determined accurately. If the camera had been looking directly down from the vehicle at its altitude of 300 km, the Y-shaped pattern would be approximately 60 km long and 40 km wide. If, as is thought probable, the camera was not looking directly down, the pattern would have somewhat greater dimensions. The photographs show that illumination from lightning discharges can cover a rather wide area.