Ribbon lightning - It looks like streamers flashing through the sky. Silent lightning - It appears without a sound because it is so far away. Colored lightning - It seems to flash red or blue. Ball lightning - It is a bright round spark that seems to float in the air. In the summer of 1995 this form of lightning was discovered by scientists.
Elves are very bright, short flashes of lightning high above the clouds at the very edge of space.
They last for less than a thousandth of a second. Their color is unknown but is thought to be green. Pilots have reported seeing columns of blue or green light above thunderheads for years, but have only recently been videotaped. Sprites - A recently discovered kind of lightning. One of the first true-color pictures of a red sprite was photographed at an altitude of sixty miles over a thunderstorm in the Midwest in July of 1994.