How ISS Astronauts Take Incredible Photos Of Lightning From Space

To try to capture a thunderstorm image again, Mogensen will use a camera on the space station, which looks out of a rounded window called a cupola. But rather than using only the standard camera, an additional camera with special qualities is added.

The Davis camera is an event camera that automatically responds when there is a significant change in brightness. Instead of pushing a button to take an image and capturing whatever is happening at that moment, the Davis camera responds when something changes in its view — in this case, hopefully catching the events of a thunderstorm in action.

“We are excited to have Andreas Mogensen look for thunderstorms with the new event camera. Last time, he captured a blue jet, so we hope for even more pictures over his six-month stay. This will be the first time an event camera is used to observe lightning events by an astronaut,” said DTU Space senior researcher Olivier Chanrion.

The Davis camera can respond extremely fast, collecting data equivalent to 100,000 images per second. That should enable it to capture the very short discharges of lightning that occur between the clouds but don’t reach Earth. These events, called transient luminous events (TLEs), include blue jets of lightning shooting up from clouds and into space and flashes of red light called sprites.