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December 2025

NASA Science Calendar Image of the Month. Photo and text credit: Photo by NASA’s Spritacular project participant Nicolas Escurat

Nighttime photograph showing a red sprite, a rare upper atmospheric electrical phenomenon, appearing as a crimson flash above Château de Beynac castle in Dordogne, France. The sprite extends vertically in the dark sky above storm clouds, captured by NASA Spritacular citizen science project participant Nicolas Escurat.

December 2025 Image

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Spritacular Citizen Scientist Captures Photo of Elusive Upper Atmospheric Electrical Phenomena Over Château de Beynac

  • A flash of lightning, and then—something else. High above a storm, a crimson figure blinks in and out of existence. If you see it, you are a lucky witness of a sprite, one of the least-understood electrical phenomena in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

    Photo and text credit: Photo by NASA’s Spritacular project participant Nicolas Escurat; text by Miles Hatfield

    Learn more about Citizen Science

    Nighttime photograph showing a red sprite, a rare upper atmospheric electrical phenomenon, appearing as a crimson flash above Château de Beynac castle in Dordogne, France. The sprite extends vertically in the dark sky above storm clouds, captured by NASA Spritacular citizen science project participant Nicolas Escurat.

You can do NASA science!

  • You can Do NASA Science! Join NASA researchers and discover the secrets of the universe, search for life elsewhere, and protect and improve life on Earth and in space. Through these projects, sometimes called "citizen science" or "participatory science" projects, volunteers and amateurs have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. These projects are open to everyone (no citizenship required). 

    Learn how you can get involved

A hand holds a cell phone against a landscape of rolling hills and a cloudy sky.

Spritacular Project

  • Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) are colorful, bright, faster-than-lightning flashes that thunderstorms generate above the clouds. TLEs can take a variety of fanciful shapes with equally fanciful names. The most frequently observed TLEs are called “sprites,” like the enigmatic and playful fairies of folklore.

    The Spritacular project invites photographers from all over the world to contribute observations of TLEs to help us better understand these enchanting phenomena and their role in our skies.

    Learn how you can get involved

This image shows a wide view of a horizon, with the distinctive round top of an observatory on top of a dark mountain on the left and a big storm cloud over the horizon on the right, with a wide view of distant stars clear in the night sky above. The storm cloud is lit from within by lighting, with a white-to-purple to red finger of light extending from the top of the cloud up. The top of this finger of light extends much higher in the sky than the distance from cloud-to-ground. At the top of this jet, the light is red and spreads in smaller fingers, still pointing up, like a tight bouquet of grass blades or a quiver of arrows.

Discover More about Citizen Science

Dark Energy Explorers

Help illuminate the mystery of dark energy - the unknown force that is driving galaxies away from one another!

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Four black bears walk along a dirt road. Thin white-barked birch tree trunks are growing in either side of the road. The face of first bear, which is noticeably larger than the three that follow, is turned towards the camera.

Snapshot Wisconsin

Do you ever wonder what wildlife is wandering around in the woods? With Snapshot Wisconsin, you can find out!

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Rubin Comet Catchers

Rubin Comet Catchers invites you to join this historic search by helping identify rare objects like water-bearing comets and asteroids in the Rubin images.

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A vivid red sprite lightning burst appears high in the night sky above a distant mountain range. The sprite glows with intricate, tendril-like patterns and is topped with a faint green glow, set against a starry background.

Q&A with Dr. Burcu Kosar about Spritacular

What are those ghostly figures haunting the tops of thunderstorms? They’re sprites! In this Q&A, NASA’s Dr. Burcu Kosar talks about her new citizen science project Spritacular and how you can help advance the science of these mysterious electrical phenomena.

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Cloudspotting on Mars: Shapes

What are the daily, seasonal and yearly patterns in Martian cloud shapes and distributions? How do Martian clouds reflect wind patterns? Help this project find answers!

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Are we Alone in the Universe?

You can help identify the most promising signals in the data. Learn how to identify the common classes of radio frequency interference (RFI) to weed out the noise and find the signals that might indicate extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Featured Video

What is a Sprite?

A flash of lightning, and then – something else. High above the storm, a crimson figure blinks in and out of existence. If you saw it, you are a lucky witness of a sprite, one of the least-understood electrical phenomena in Earth’s upper atmosphere. But if you caught it on camera, your photo could contribute to a ground-breaking scientific discovery.

Watch on YouTube

Explore our other featured images

A vivid aurora borealis in shades of purple, green, and pink illuminates the night sky, reflected on a calm body of water with a silhouette of rolling hills in the distance. NASA logo and text 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration' are visible in the upper corners.

January 2025

Auroras
A digital NASA image depicting a sequence of asteroids arranged in a curved trajectory against a black background. The NASA logo appears in the upper right corner, and the text 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration' is visible in the upper left. The bottom left corner includes the URL 'www.nasa.gov.'

February 2025

Asteroids
Computer monitor displaying a vibrant scientific visualization with blue, red, and green cell-like patterns.

March 2025

Space Radiation
Air and Ocean Views

April 2025

Air and Ocean
Cool as Ice

May 2025

Mars
Colorful composite image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, showing intricate, glowing filaments in blue, red, green, and yellow. Captured using NASA’s James Webb and Chandra telescopes, the image reveals expanding shockwaves and stellar debris from the exploded star, set against a star-filled background.

June 2025

Supernova

July 2025

Our Sun
This face-on view of spiral galaxy NGC 628 is split diagonally, showing observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the top left portion of the image and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the bottom right portion. JWST�s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light, while HST�s observations showcase visible light. Complementary views show predominantly stars (HST) and obscuring dust (JWST). In JWST�s high-resolution infrared images, the gas and dust stand out in stark shades of orange and red and show finer spiral shapes with the appearance of jagged edges, though these areas are still diffuse. In HST�s images, the gas and dust show up as hazy dark brown lanes, following the same spiral shapes. HST�s images are about the same resolution as JWST�s, but the gas and dust obscure a lot of the smaller-scale star formation. Image and text credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (University of Oxford), Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) Team

August 2025

Galaxies
Thinning Arctic Sea Ice

September 2025

Arctic Sea Ice
Jupiter's moon Io appearing golden-tan against the blackness of space, half the moon bathed in shadow, half in light, bisected vertically, with mountain peaks and volcanos pockmarking the surface.

October 2025

Jupiter's Moon Io
Microscopic cross-section of a solder bead showing a copper wire (orange, upper left) and void (blue-green circle, lower right) surrounded by dark brown and greenish-blue solder material, resembling a solar system with the wire as the sun and void as Earth.

November 2025

Universe in Solder Bead