Rare lightning strikes backward from the sky

The moment the gigantic jet lightning backs up from the thunderstorm cloud onto the ionosphere and is captured by a photographer through an airplane window.

Lightning gigantic jet glowed in front of the wings.(Photo: Hung-Hsi Chang).

Photographer Hung-Hsi Chang photographed a rare gigantic jet known as the gigantic jet appearing on the horizon during a flight from Munich to Singapore. The photo is shared by the US Space Agency (NASA) in the section of beautiful Astronomy Photos every day. According to NASA, Hung photographed lightning with a 3.2-second exposure above the city of Bhadrak, India.

"Although gigantic jet lightning seems to be attached to the wing, it certainly originates from a thunderstorm cloud much farther and heads towards the ionosphere," NASA said.

Gigantic jet lightning is a very strong form of lightning that takes place between clouds and the ionosphere, where the voltage is hundreds of kilovolt higher than the surface of the Earth.In fact, this is a carrot-shaped red clay rising up from the center of a thunderstorm cloud. A typical lightning strike reaches about 10km away but gigantic jet lightning can be longer than 70km.