April 19, 2023
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
Auroral Storm over Lapland
Birthday · April 19, 2023
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APOD published April 19, 2023. Credit: Juan Carlos Casado. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
On some nights the sky is the best show in town. On this night, auroras ruled the sky, and the geomagnetic storm that created this colorful sky show originated from an increasingly active Sun. Surprisingly, since the approaching solar CME the day before had missed the Earth, it was not expected that this storm would create auroras. In the foreground, two happily surprised aurora hunters contemplate the amazing and rapidly changing sky. Regardless of forecasts, though, auroras were reported in the night skies of Earth not only in the far north, but as far south as New Mexico, USA. As captured in a wide-angle image above Saariselkä in northern Finnish Lapland, a bright aurora was visible with an unusually high degree of detail, range of colors, and breadth across the sky. The vivid yellow, green, red and purple auroral colors are caused by oxygen and nitrogen atoms high in Earth's atmosphere reacting to incoming electrons. Open Science: Browse 3,000+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library
Image credit: Juan Carlos Casado