Flash of brilliance: Nasa captures stunning lightning strike from aboard the ISS

Nasa has released awe-inspiring images of a lightning strike as seen from aboard the International Space Station.

The stunning photos show a cloudy outlook over the Arabian peninsula, with lightning lighting up the sky over a section of our planet.

A huge expanse of orange towards the bottom of the image is Kuwait City, while Haar Al Batin in Saudi Arabia is also visible at the top of the picture.

The Nasa photo was taken in December, but has only just been released as part of the launch of Firestation, a new instrument on the ISS dedicated to tracking lightning.

Capturing moments like this is rare, but lightning bolts actually happen quite often. Firestation is observing around 50 lightning strikes per day, and looking for brief bursts of gamma rays.

There are estimated to be up to 4.3 million lightning strikes every day, or 1.5 billion a year, according to Nasa.

The lightning strikes they want to capture are ones which emit gamma rays - a form of radiation normally only created by exploding stars and during nuclear fusion. These lightning strikes are known as TGFs.

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Doug Rowland, principal investigator for Firestation and a space physicist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said: ‘The fact that TGFs exist at all is amazing.

‘The electron and gamma-ray energies in TGFs are usually the domain of nuclear explosions, solar flares, and supernovas. What a surprise to find them shooting out of the cold upper atmosphere of our own planet.'