Christians merely get Jesus on pita bread or Madonna’s on plate glass windows — we get squid-shaped lightning, which is obviously much more impressive.
![i-f5bf56a116d5a68377915cfce0c99886-squid_lightning.jpeg](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-f5bf56a116d5a68377915cfce0c99886-squid_lightning.jpeg)
Alas, no magic squid in the sky for us, though — these are entirely natural phenomena.
“Sprites are a true space weather phenomenon,” he adds. “They develop in mid-air around 80 km altitude, growing in both directions, first down, then up. This happens when a fierce lightning bolt draws lots of charge from a cloud near Earth’s surface. Electric fields [shoot] to the top of Earth’s atmosphere–and the result is a sprite. The entire process takes about 20 milliseconds.”