January 25, 2024
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
Jyväskylä in the Sky
Birthday · January 25, 2024
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published January 25, 2024. Credit: Harri Kiiskinen. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
You might not immediately recognize this street map of a neighborhood in Jyväskylä, Finland, planet Earth. But that's probably because the map was projected into the night sky and captured with an allsky camera on January 16. The temperature recorded on that northern winter night was around minus 20 degrees Celsius. As ice crystals formed in the atmosphere overhead, street lights spilling illumination into the sky above produced visible light pillars, their ethereal appearance due to specular reflections from the fluttering crystals' flat surfaces. Of course, the projected light pillars trace a map of the brightly lit local streets, though reversed right to left in the upward looking camera's view. This light pillar street map was seen to hover for hours in the Jyväskylä night.
Image credit: Harri Kiiskinen