The phrase "luminous phenomenon" is correct and usable in written English.
For example, you could use it in the sentence, "The aurora borealis is an incredibly spectacular luminous phenomenon."
Aurora, luminous phenomenon of Earth's upper atmosphere that occurs primarily in high latitudes of both hemispheres; auroras in the Northern Hemisphere are called aurora borealis, aurora polaris, or northern lights, and in the Southern Hemisphere aurora australis, or southern lights.
Tohoku University' satellite, Sprite, is aimed at observing the luminous phenomenon.
Anecdotes of such luminous phenomenon are reported in ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese documents (Musha, 1931; Terada, 1931; Derr, 1973; Ikeya and Takaki, 1996).
The CEFAA Scientific Committee concluded by consensus that this was an "anomalous luminous phenomenon" of unknown origin.
Therefore, we surveyed the words that refer to luminous phenomena, such as vapor, light, and cloud.
A common approach in studying luminous phenomena is spectroscopy to infer the excitation mechanism.
Similarly to Keimatsu, we assume that the records of luminous phenomena observed at night are potentially those of auroras.
This has been a common term for any luminous phenomena of the night sky since Antiquity (Stothers 1979).
Keimatsu (1976) listed all the luminous phenomena seen at night and also discussed whether they correspond to auroras or not.
Our observation could be related to the fast moving luminous phenomena along the earthquake fault observed in Kobe (Kamogawa et al., 2005).
Previous observations of earthquake related luminous phenomena were made by chance, and descriptions by witnesses are often sketchy, partly owing to the very short time constant of this phenomena.
