Caused by an EMP, an ELVES event lasts for less than a thousandth of a second. This snap, from November 2025, shows the enormous phenomenon in one of the few shots ever captured from the ground.
Credit: Valter Binotto
From nature to architecture, Italian photographer Valter Binotto specializes in many forms of photography, but some of his favorite scenes seem to capture weather and the night sky. On Nov. 17, he snapped an exceedingly rare snapshot of a type of upper-atmospheric lightning called an “ELVES.”
The word is actually an acronym of “emission of light and very low frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources.” What that means is that an ELVES is a quick-flash form of lightning that forms in the upper atmosphere, above intense lightning storms.
Intense-enough lightning can create electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that trigger ELVES, a release of energy that typically lasts less than a thousandth of a second. An ELVES event generally appears as a red ring in the sky, hundreds of kilometers across.
For a long time, though, reports of this phenomenon were hard to verify. Not only do they occur so rarely, but they are gone so quickly that they’re nearly impossible to document.
Credit: NOAA
In 1990, equipment onboard the Space Shuttle captured the first confirmed ELVES reading. It makes sense that the first confirmed detection would occur in space, since ELVES appear in the ionosphere, above many other layers of the atmosphere. From the ground, they’re even more challenging to spy.
According to Space.com, Binotto captured it by filming video at 25 frames per second, which lowers image quality but allows near-unlimited capture time. That’s important when the event could happen at any time over the duration of an entire storm. (For any camera nerds, his setup was a Sony A7S with a 20mm f/1.8 lens, and ISO cranked to 51,200.)
He was actually trying to capture an image of a sprite, which is a related but distinct form of lighting. For the record, many lightning terms have these sorts of whimsical names. ELVES are cousins of other elusive electromagnetic phenomena like Sprites, TROLLS (transient red optical luminous lineaments), and GHOSTS (greenish optical emission from sprite tops).
This is actually the second time Binotto, a longtime storm-snapper, has captured an ELVES, the first being in 2023. Over the years, he has personally contributed enormously to the public’s ability to understand and visualize some of the world’s most spectacular weather events.