Here's what caused the mysterious blue glow spotted from the ISS - msnNOW

A recently spotted glowing blue light above Europe is the latest in a series of exciting atmospheric storm observations.

In late September, astronauts Thomas Pesquet and Andreas Mogensen spotted a glowing blue light over Europe from up in the ISS.

Spectacular light events in the upper atmosphere are of increasing interest, and astronauts and astronomers have gotten creative naming them.

While this particular luminous event hasn’t been named, other  unique variations on storms include blue jets, red sprites, and elves.

Blue jets are lightning bolts that zap upwards from thunderstorms into the stratosphere.

ELVES (Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) are disk-shaped bursts of light that last just a thousandth of a second.

Other fantastically named light phenomena include trolls, gnomes, and pixies.

Now that scientists have empirically proven the existence of these strange but brilliant atmospheric light shows, the next steps are to study and understand the phenomena—a difficult task since they’re nearly impossible to see from Earth