Posts Tagged auroras

Image Credit & Copyright: Alex Cherney (Terrastro, TWAN)

I love this photo — looks like an aurora sunset. A pretty thing for your Wednesday!

Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week’s solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth’s atmosphere. As the excited element’s electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth’s atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right. A time-lapse video highlighting auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context. Why the sky did not also glow green remains unknown.

Image Credit & Copyright: Bjørn Jørgensen

Green fairy? Eagle? Angel? Whatever you might see in this aurora’s vast shape, I think “fantastic” is a safe description, don’t you?

What’s that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun five days ago, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Although most of this cloud passed above the Earth, some of it impacted our Earth’s magnetosphere and resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at high northern latitudes. Pictured above is a particularly photogenic auroral corona captured last night above Grotfjord, Norway. To some, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen might appear as a large eagle, but feel free to share what it looks like to you. This round of solar activity is not yet over — a new and even more powerful solar flare occurred yesterday [January 23] that might provide more amazing aurora as soon as tonight [January 24].

Curtains on the Clouds, photograph by Thilo Bubek

This aurora pic hails from September 2010; the colors are just gorgeous and worth belatedly posting. Enjoy your Tuesday!

Northern lights, or aurora borealis, stride across clouds above Ersfjord, Norway, shortly before 1 a.m. on September 15.

The display was all the more impressive because the moon had already set, scientists say. When it’s above the horizon, the moon can wash out all but the most intense of displays with its light.

Image Credit & Copyright: Fredrick Broms (Northern Lights Photography)

Amazing picture – that is all.

On September 26, a large solar coronal mass ejection smacked into planet Earth’s magnetosphere producing a severe geomagnetic storm and wide spread auroras. Captured here near local midnight from Kvaløya island outside Tromsø in northern Norway, the intense auroral glow was framed by parting rain clouds. Tinted orange, the clouds are also in silhouette as the tops of the colorful shimmering curtains of northern lights extend well over 100 kilometers above the ground. Though the auroral rays are parallel, perspective makes them appear to radiate from a vanishing point at the zenith. Near the bottom of the scene, an even more distant Pleiades star cluster and bright planet Jupiter shine on this cloudy northern night.

Aurora over Coldfoot, Alaska, Mar. 2, 2011. Photo © Cory Newberry

And now for something completely different — a blog post not having to do with STS-133 or space shuttle Discovery. It’s been a while since I’ve made an aurora post, so here’s some beautiful selections from March’s archive at SpaceWeather.com.

Aurora over Russia, Murmansk, Mar. 1, 2011. Photo © Maxim Letovaltsev.

Frankly, I can’t pick just one. Or even two.

Aurora over Russia, Murmansk region, Apatity, Mar. 1, 2011. Photo © Valentine Zhiganov.

So here, have four.

Aurora over Yellowknife area, NWT, Canada, Mar. 2, 2011. Photo © Kevin Schafer

Credit & Copyright: Ole Christian Salomonsen

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an aurora photo, and this one is particularly fantastic (featured on APOD on September 20):

Auroras can make spectacular sights. Photographed above last weekend, flowing multi-colored auroras helped illuminate a busy sky above Tromsø, Norway. Besides the spectacular aurora pictured above, the photographer caught three satellites streaks, one airplane streak, and a friend trying to capture the same sight. Although auroras might first appear to be moonlit clouds, they only add light to the sky and do not block background stars from view. Called northern lights in the northern hemisphere, auroras are caused by collisions between charged particles from the magnetosphere and air molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere. If viewed from space, auroras can be seen to glow in X-ray and ultraviolet light as well. Predictable auroras might occur a few days after a powerful magnetic event has been seen on the Sun.