This month, people in Oklahoma have been treated to a stunning and extremely rare display - a red sprite lightning storm.

The extraordinary weather occurrence is caused by electrical bursts of light above highly active thunderstorms, and appears as jellyfish-shaped clusters of red light.

Red sprites are rarely seen, yet one lucky videographer managed to catch the display six times during a storm earlier this month over Edmond, Oklahoma.

On October 6, videographer Paul Smith headed outdoors with his camera to capture some of the lightening forks on film, but instead he managed to capture something far more remarkable.

Sprawled out in the sky intermittently appears a spectacular series of bright red, jellyfish-shaped clusters of light, an extraordinary weather occurrence known as a 'red sprite'.

Do Supernova Events Cause Extreme Climate Changes?

"Global warming will not be reduced by reducing man made CO2 emissions" - Dr. William Sokeland

In recent years, mass die-offs of large animals - like the sudden deaths of 211,000 endangered antelopes within a matter of weeks - have been described as "mysterious" and remain largely unexplained.

Determining the cause of the retreat to ice ages and the abrupt warmings that spawned the interglacial periods has remained controversial for many decades.

Dr. William Sokeland, a heat transfer expert and thermal engineer from the University of Florida, has published a paper in the Journal of Earth Science and Engineering that proposes rapid ice melt events and ice age terminations, extreme weather events leading to mass die-offs, and even modern global warming can be traced to (or at least correlate well with) supernova impact events.

The perspectives and conclusions of researchers who claim to have found strong correlations that could explain such wide-ranging geological phenomena as the causes of glacials/interglacials, modern temperatures, and mysterious large animal die-offs should at least be considered...while maintaining a healthy level of skepticism, of course.

Discovery - if that is potentially what is occurring here - is worth a look.

Hurricane Ophelia somehow has pulled Saharan dust from the western edges of the African continent in a strange N-S wind pattern. The flow is usually from west Africa to eastern coast of N. America. 80mph winds and dust turn day to night, literally where drivers needed to turn on headlights during the day. This is in London and across the UK. 50% of the orange crop in the US is gone, lowest yield since world war two, USA rice crop collapsing, wheat prices up and somehow the main stream media still refuses to discuss the Sun as driving climate on our planet in multi century cycles.

Unusual glow comes about as result of Storm Ophelia picking up sands from north Africa and particles from Iberian forest fires

The strange reddish sky reported over parts of the UK may appear to some a sign of impending apocalypse or a celestial Instagram filter, but experts say there is a scientific explanation.

The hue is a remnant of Storm Ophelia dragging in tropical air and dust from the Sahara, while debris from forest fires in Portugal and Spain is also playing a part, according to the BBC weather presenter Simon King.

The dust has caused shorter-wavelength blue light to be scattered, making it appear red. "Ophelia originated in the Azores, where it was a hurricane, and as it tracked its way northwards, it dragged in tropical air from the Sahara," King said.

"The dust gets picked up into the air and goes high up into the atmosphere, and that dust has been dragged high up in the atmosphere above the UK."

The Met Office said the vast majority of the dust was due to forest fires on the Iberian peninsula, which have sent debris into the air. This has been dragged north by Ophelia.

Australian Aborigines probably observed the cyclical changes in the brightness of pulsating red giant stars such as Antares, Betelgeuse, and Aldebaran. They integrated their observations into their oral traditions - cultural narratives that served as a system of laws, social rules, and general knowledge transmission.

European astronomers realized that red giants changed in brightness in 1596, when David Fabricius registered the variability of the star Mira. Johannes Hevelius went on to calculate the amplitude and periodicity of Mira's changes in 1662. But the oral traditions of Australian Aborigines could go much further back in time: they have inhabited the fifth continent for more than 65,000 years. Research examining oral tradition for geological events, such as volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts, have shown that such oral traditions can survive for thousands of years.

Duane Hamacher (Monash University and University of Southern Queensland, Australia), found new references to variable stars after reinterpreting the accounts of 19th- and 20th-century anthropologists and ethnologists, who recorded some of the Aboriginal oral traditions. His results are being published in a new study in the Australian Journal of Anthropology.

According to Hamacher, anthropologists sometimes misinterpreted Aboriginal accounts in the past, wrongfully assuming them to refer to planets in the solar system rather than stars.

"Many anthropologists had limited training in astronomy, so misidentifications, conflated terminology, and errors were not uncommon," Hamacher says. "Mars and Antares are often mixed up because of their comparable brightness and occasional close proximity."

Hamacher found two oral traditions that referenced the variable stars Betelgeuse, Antares and Aldebaran. Their changes in brightness carried important weight in the narratives and helped encode certain social rules, such as signaling to the tribe when to celebrate initiation rituals.

This is the first clear evidence of indigenous peoples observing and recording stellar variation in oral traditions. The only widely accepted record of a pulsating variable comes from an Egyptian papyrus called the Cairo calendar, which predicted good and bad luck periods throughout the year, dated around 1200 B.C. A statistical analysis of those periods revealed that they followed the variation of the eclipsing binary star Algol.

As discussed in a number of previous posts, Mars became captured in a geostationary orbit 36,000 km above Mt. Kailas, in the TransHimalayas, for 14.4 years and then was released into a planetary orbit for 15.6 years. This 30-year cycle was repeated one hundred times between 3687 and 687 BC, and observed by one hundred generations of mankind who incorporated observations of these events in ancient texts. In the Rig Veda the capture periods were called kalpas and 'days of Brahma'. In Egyptian myth they were called 'inundations' due to the tidal effect of Mars (Horus on the Horizon), which drew the Nile waters across eastern Egypt, increasing the fertility there.

During each kalpa, Mars exerted a continuous tidal effect on the Deccan Traps volcanism, drawing the subsurface asthenosphere rock upward producing an additional 20-meter thick layer, 'traps' meaning steps. Therefore, the Deccan Traps represent a geological clock covering approximately 3000 to 687 BC, herein dubbed the Vedic Period. It is impossible to drill through the many layers of the Deccan Traps. Instead, different provinces have been dated, where older sections of the traps are exposed.

This has proven difficult for several reasons. Most significantly, the 'Trap' rocks do not give the ancient dates that geologists expected, because they are less than 6,000 years old. Geologists maintain that potassium-argon, (K-Ar), dating does not work because the isotope ratios of argon in the atmosphere have changed.

That is true, because the entire atmosphere of the Earth changed during the Vedic Period due to the influx of the entire Martian atmosphere.

To overcome this apparent obstacle, geologists have reverted to using the thin layers of material between the actual steps, called 'separates', assuming it is also of earthly origin. But these thin layers comprise material from Mars which fell from the atmosphere between kalpas. Although the (U-Pb) in zircons in the separates have a wide range of ages, those with the ages supporting the hypothetical Cenezoic period are chosen, thereby justifying the age of deepest layers of the Deccan Traps at 66 million years BP. The 'separate'layers are proof that there was significant time between each of the one hundred rock layers.

University of Leicester contributes to best-ever results on a 'new star' in a nearby galaxy.
Astronomers have today announced that they have discovered possibly the most luminous 'new star' ever - a nova discovered in the direction of one of our closest neighboring galaxies: The Small Magellanic Cloud.

Astronomers from the University of Leicester contributed to the discovery by using the Swift satellite observatory to help understand what was likely the most luminous white dwarf eruption ever seen.

A nova happens when an old star erupts dramatically back to life. In a close binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a Sun-like companion star, material is transferred from the companion to the white dwarf, gradually building up until it reaches a critical pressure. Then uncontrolled nuclear burning occurs, leading to a sudden and huge increase in brightness. It is called a nova because it appeared to be a new star to the ancients.

This was the stunning moment a large fire rainbow appeared through the clouds.

Onlookers captured the beautiful sight in Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand, last Friday at 4pm local time.

The phenomenon - known as a circumhorizontal arc - is caused by sunlight shining through tiny ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere.

It causes a stunning rainbow-like effect that appears like a glowing ball of multi-coloured bright light in the sky.

An amazing tube-shaped cloud struck awe into witnesses when it was filmed in the sky above Japan.

The tube of pale cloud filmed in the city of Niigata in central Japan's Chubu Region looks only a few inches wide in the clip, snaking down from a sky full of dark grey clouds above, though its apparent size may be an optical illusion.

Japanese media reported that locals who witnessed the tube cloud were 'awe-struck' by the phenomenon.

With the geomagnetic storm on September 29-29, 2017 Earths skies were filled with plasma arcing bows stretching horizon to horizon, reforming into what was previously only ever seen twice before as a single strand. Now the amplification is an aural plasma bow. Earlier in the month there were picket auroras, and more red sprites and back in July 2017, incredibly rare ball lightning.


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