A NASA astronaut has photographed eerie glowing red lights hanging in Earth's atmosphere from a window aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The jaw-dropping image, taken by the commander of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission Matthew Dominick on June 3, captured the quick-flash of a weather phenomena known as 'red sprite' lightning.

Red sprites are known to occur high above thunder clouds in a part of the upper atmosphere called the mesosphere that extends up to 53 miles above the surface.

The image showed blood-red bursts of energy glowing standing vertical off the coast of South Africa.

NASA hopes the sprite's ethereal image will encourage skywatchers on Earth to send in their own 'photographs of sprites and other [Transient Luminous Events or] TLEs to NASA's citizen science project, Spritacular.' 

The American space agency hope this citizen-crowdsourced database, which will enter its third year of operation this October, will greatly help scientists understand the rare phenomena. 

'Super lucky a few weeks ago when shooting a timelapse of a lightning storm off the coast of South Africa,' as Dominick explained his image in a post to social site X.  

'One of the frames in the timelapse had a red sprite,' said Dominick, who previously served as a naval test pilot and fighter pilot commander prior to joining NASA.

'If there are any red sprite experts out there I would enjoy tips on how to capture more of these,' he added. 

'Clearly, look for lightning storms, but I'm thinking the stronger the storm the better.'

Space physicist Dr Burcu Kosar, who serves as the principal investigator for Spritacular, noted that the project hopes to pair just such accidental photographers of phenomena like red sprites with the scientists who study them 

'People capture wonderful images of sprites, but they're shared sporadically over the internet,' she noted, 'most of the scientific community is unaware of these captures.'

'Spritacular will bridge this gap,' according to Dr Kosar, who works with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Dominick captured his image of the distinctive red sprites from a vantage point  hundreds of miles above these high-altitude electrical discharges, in orbit within the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles above Earth's surface.

A NASA press release on the new image further explained that 'Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), including red sprites, are colorful bursts of energy that appear above storms as a result of lightning activity occurring in and below storms on Earth.'

The space agency noted that these and other TLEs are most often captured on camera by happy accidents like this, typically while taking timelapse images of the Earth with the aid of a wide focal-length lens.

On ISS, these timelapse images are usually taken by scientific instruments mounted outside the space station, like the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM). 

ASIM's sensor suite collects a broad spectrum of data for scientific research on Earth, including cameras, photometers, X-ray and gamma-ray detectors.