The Cassini spacecraft has captured lightning flashing in a cloud on Saturn’s dark side in a first-of-its-kind video.

Scientists have picked up radio signals for years that indicated that lightning storms happened on the planet, but this is the first time that they were able to see and “hear” the electrical storms at the same time.

“This is the first time we have the visible lightning flash together with the radio data,” said Georg Fischer, a radio and plasma wave scientist based at the Space Research Institute in Graz, Austria, in a press release. “Now that the radio and visible light data line up, we know for sure we are seeing powerful lightning storms.”

The video was shot over 16 minutes and compressed down into the 10 seconds that you see here. The cloud, which is about 1,900 miles along its longest side, is illuminated by the reflection of Saturn’s rings. Each flash is about 190 miles (300 kilometers) across with an energy comparable to the most intense lightning here on Earth. In real time, they lasted for about one second.

The crackling soundtrack to the video is synthetic. It approximates the actual sounds received by Cassini’s radio recording instrument, which are above the human hearing range.

Images: NASA/JPL/SSI/University of Iowa

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