A mysterious green flash has bewildered an astronaut currently orbiting earth.
Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick set up a timelapse to capture extraordinary footage of Earth from over North Africa, but when he reviewed the footage he discovered something out-of-this-world... literally. Take a look:
The footage shows brilliant 'paparazzi-like' lights flicker across the continent, which are actually lightning storms - and they can be seen from space pretty much around the clock.
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A bit of trivia for you, according to the Met Office, the UK's national weather and climate service, thunderstorms are much more common than you'd think.
It wrote: "Thunderstorms are common occurrences on Earth. It is estimated that a lightning strike hits somewhere on the Earth's surface approximately 44 times every second, a total of nearly 1.4 billion lightning strikes every year."
So by the time you finish brushing your teeth - two minutes if you're doing them right - lightning would have struck the ground somewhere on the planet more than 5,000 times.
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But it wasn't the storms that sparked the NASA astronaut's curiosity, but a bolide.
Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "I showed this to a couple of friends yesterday to see what they thought. They both thought it was a meteor exploding in the atmosphere - a rather bright one called a bolide.
"Timelapse is slowed down to one frame per second for you to see it streaking and then exploding."
A bolide is an extremely bright meteor that explodes when it breaks into our planet's atmosphere.
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He continued: "Timelapse was setup over Northern Africa where it was very dark with lightning. I got greedy with ISO (25600) and when the timelapse got to Cairo the cities were overexposed.
"I was greedy because I wanted the Milky Way Core. When I went to review the shots afterwards I found the bolide."
He went on: "For those asking about date and time for meteor tracking: The meteor exploded on 2 Sept 2024 at 20:12:20 GMT based on the clock in the camera which may be off by 30s or so either side."
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In both recordings you can see the meteor hurtling towards Earth, before breaking through the planet's atmosphere - at which point it bursts into flames over over Cairo, the capital city of Egypt.
The astronaut, who is part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission which saw him launch to the ISS in March, took to the social media platform to ask users: "If you know about these type of meteors please chime in. I am curious to know more."
Joe Yates