A blue bolt out of the blue: On the edge of space, lightning leaps *upward*

Chances are, you've seen, heard, or felt a lightning bolt erupt in the sky somewhere near you. After all, there are well over a billion lightning flashes on Earth per year. That's about four dozen per second, somewhere over our planet (sometimes in one spot, where an astronomer with a phonecam can get video).

Thunderstorms are a common feature of our planet, and the electrical fields therein are the root source of the power of lightning. But they also generate other phenomena, too, ones that we...