High-speed Telescopic Imaging of a Sprite Streamer Head

Sprites start with downward moving streamer heads and the similarity between sprite streamers and streamers observed in the laboratory has been noted by many researchers. We present here high-speed optical observations of a downward propagating sprite streamer head showing remarkable similarity with a laboratory streamer head recorded by Nudnova and Starikovski (J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys., 41, doi:10.1088/0022-3727/41/23/234003, 2008). The sprite event was recorded at 07:06:09 UT on 15 July 2010 from the Langmuir Laboratory, New Mexico. The camera used was an intensified Phantom 7.3 high-speed camera with a 500 mm Takahashi Sky 9 lens giving a field-of-view of 1.3x0.6 degrees. Another similar high-speed camera with an 85 mm Nikon lens, co-aligned with the telescopic camera, had a 7.3x3.7 degree field-of-view. The two cameras were operated at 16,000 fps with 20 μs exposures and 10,000 fps with 100 μs exposures respectively. The two sets of observations offer an opportunity to investigate the scaling laws between high altitude sprite streamers and those observed under ground-based laboratory conditions.