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You’ve seen time-lapse videos of the night sky here before, but this one is particularly beautiful, awe-inspiring, and soothing. It’s even more impressive in full-screen mode. Randy Halverson shot the scenes in South Dakota, Utah, Colorado, and Wisconsin. You have to get way out beyond the light pollution to see the stars this way! The music was specially composed for the project by Bear McCreary, who does the music for the TV shows The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, and more. You can learn more about the video at Halverson’s website. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
See also: Bad Astronomy’s post about the astronomical events in the video. Link
Stephanie Vetter captured this amazing photograph of the Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland. The rainbow is caused not by sunlight, but the illumination of a nearly full moon against the backdrop of the Northern Lights.
Stephanie Vetter captured this photograph of an aurora over Jökulsárlón, a glacial lake in Iceland. It won an international competition for landscape astrophotography.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Leicester
Earth is not the only planet with the phenomenon of polar lights, Saturn has ‘em too! NASA’s Cassini orbiter captured infrared images that revealed the stunning sights. From National Geographic’s Breaking Orbit Blog:
In the picture, the ring of green auroras might seem faint, but that curtain of light is shooting up about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the cloud tops of Saturn’s south polar region.
In general, astronomers think auroras on Saturn occur via a process similar to the one that creates Earth’s polar lights.
Charged particles from the sun flow along the planet’s magnetic field lines, hitting the upper atmosphere at the poles. There the particles excite (or transfer energy to) atoms in the atmosphere, and the excited atoms release the excess energy as light.
In Saturn’s case, auroras can also be sparked by electromagnetic waves generated when the planet’s moons move through the charged gas that fills Saturn’s magnetosphere, the bubble around the planet created by its magnetic field.
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Three years ago, Miss Cellania posted a picture of the Aurora Australis — the Southern Lights — as seen from the IMAGE spacecraft. The lovely photo above of the same phenomenon was taken on May 29 from the International Space Station. In Popular Science, Clay Dillow writes:
This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can’t see the southernmost continent in the photograph. The ISS orbits at around 220 miles, while the aurora was located somewhere in the ionosphere between 60 and 190 miles above the planet’s surface.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: NASA
Auroras or the Northern Lights are in my bucket list – I know that they are caused by the collision of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetic field but I can’t help to feel that these phenomenons are but a small display of how majestic Mother Nature can be.
Anyway, until I can haul my lazy butt to the (very far and very cold) polar region, these fantastic photos of auroras by Dennis C. Anderson of Night Trax Photography have got to suffice. They’re some of the most beautiful photos I’ve ever seen.
This one to the left, titled A Colorful Dawn, was taken back in 2003 in Homer, Alaska. Check out the entire gallery here (not to be missed!): Link (you can buy prints there, too)
