Photographer captures eerie red halo hovering over the Italian Alps in rare 'elve' sighting (photo)

For a split second over northern Italy, the night sky erupted with a colossal glowing red ring. One photographer was in the right place at the right time.

Valter Binotto captured the eerie flash above the foothills of the Italian Alps from his home in the small town of Possagno on Nov. 17. The strange red ring is an "elve," a rare and almost impossibly fast form of upper atmospheric lightning that most people will never see.

Elves are rapidly expanding disk-shaped flashes that can grow up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) across and last for less than a thousandth of a second, according to NOAA. They occur high above thunderstorms when a powerful electromagnetic pulse shoots upward into the ionosphere, the same ionized region of Earth's upper atmosphere where auroras form.

Binotto had origi