Yes. A sprite can appear in a photo even if the shutter is open for several seconds, because exposure depends on brightness as well as duration. The dark sky and stars may require multi-second exposures, but a bright transient event can still register during that interval.

This is similar to lightning or flash photography: the flash may last only a tiny fraction of a second, yet it is clearly recorded because it is much brighter than the ambient scene. Community examples mentioned night-sky exposures around 8 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 3200, and lightning photography often uses bulb mode with exposures of several seconds.

So if the photographer was already shooting long exposures for meteors or the night sky, a sprite occurring during one of those exposures could absolutely be captured. The sprite would only contribute light for its brief duration, but if it is bright enough, that is sufficient to make it visible in the final image.

In short: long shutter times do not prevent recording a very short event; they simply give the event a window in which to occur. The hard part is timing and luck, since sprites are rare and brief.