August 14, 2024
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
Meteors and Aurora over Germany
Birthday · August 14, 2024
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APOD published August 14, 2024. Credit: Chantal Anders. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Therefore, meteors streaked across the dark night as small bits cast off from Comet Swift-Tuttle came crashing into the Earth's atmosphere. Even more unusually, for central Germany at least, the night sky glowed purple. The red-blue hue was due to aurora caused by an explosion of particles from the Sun a few days before. This auroral storm was so intense that it was seen as far south as Texas and Italy, in Earth's northern hemisphere. The featured image composite was built from 7 exposures taken over 26 minutes from Ense, Germany. The Perseids occur predictably every August, but auroras visible this far south are more unusual and less predictable. Gallery: Perseid Meteor Shower 2024 and Aurorae
Image credit: Chantal Anders