Earth Weather / Space Weather 

Image Credit: Walter Lyons, FMA Research, Fort Collins, Colorado
To test for the viability of extraterrestrial sprites, Dubrovin and
her fellow researchers re-created the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn,
and Venus in small containers. A circuit that creates strong
short-voltage pulses produced a discharge that mimics natural sprites.
Images of these discharges, known as streamers, were taken by a fast and
sensitive camera, then analyzed. Quantifying factors such as
brightness, color, size, radius, and speed could help researchers
measure how powerful extraterrestrial lightning actually is, she notes.
Smiling, Dubrovin said:

We make sprites-in-a-bottle.

Will Cassini spacecraft study sprites in Saturn’s atmosphere?
Dubrovin believes that the team’s predictions could convince
scientists operating the Cassini spacecraft — now orbiting Saturn as
part of an ESA/NASA mission — to point their cameras in a new direction.
Currently, she says, there is a huge lightning storm occurring on
Saturn producing at least 100 lightning discharges per second — a rare
event that happens approximately once in a decade. Above the
lightning-producing clouds in Jupiter’s and Saturn’s atmosphere,
Dubrovin explains, lies a layer of clouds which partly obscure the light
from the flashes. If researchers were able to obtain an image of the
higher-up sprites from the Cassini craft, it would enable them to gain
more information about the storm below.