The extreme weather in the Czech Republic continued in the beginning of August 2013 by period of extremely high temperatures (daily maxima 36-38°C). This period was terminated by a cold front accompanied by intense and devastating thunderstorms. In the evening of August 6, there were intense thunderstorms were above Bohemia, but the sky was clear above Moravia. My friend Pavel Štarha was monitoring, as usually, the weather carefully and called me that there was an excellent situation for observing of red sprites above the thunderstorm. We agreed on camera, optics and exposure strategy. Pavel used full advantage of his observing place in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands which was rather near the thunderstorm (about 130 km) and still with clear sky. Finally he brought 12 images of red sprites and plenty of calibration data. The images presented on this page are the result of rather complicated and time consuming processing aimed on removing the background caused by light pollution, precise color calibration, careful filtration of color noise and preserving the sky background with stars.

 


Miloslav Druckmüller
Institute of Mathematics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
druckmuller@fme.vutbr.cz