I don’t usually envy people who live in places like Iceland or Northern Canada – cold, dark and desolate places. But I am insanely jealous of them for one reason: the Aurora Borealis. Aurorae light up their skies, when charged particles streaming out from the Sun slam into the Earth’s magnetic field, get accelerated along the field lines towards the poles, creating these luminescent showers of light as they interact with the atoms in the upper atmosphere.
I’ve only ever seen the Aurora from an airplane, which is probably the only exciting thing that’s ever happened to me on a long-haul flight. I instantly turned into nerdy scientist-slash-annoyingly chatty airplane neighbour. But it was an Aurora, seen from above! How cool. I usually prefer my flights uneventful and boring but Aurorae are always welcome.
Anyway, I was reminded of this by reading Amanda’s post on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year pool on Flickr, and the gallery she’s curating for April, called April Apparitions, which contains some stunning Aurora images. After a lengthy quiet period, the Sun’s activity is steadily increasing, and a geomagnetic storm on 5 April has apparently led to some of the most spectacular Aurora displays in recent years for the lucky inhabitants of our polar regions.
It’s not only the lowly Earth-dwellers who’ve been able to enjoy the spectacle – our space-flying buddies have also witnessed the displays from the ISS. Astronaut happy snapper Soichi Noguchi posted this picture online recently from the ISS (more here). Amazing!
Images: orvaratli (top); S. Noguchi (bottom)
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