July 30, 2023
You were not dropped into the cosmos as a stranger. You came from it entirely: borrowed from stars, carried by Earth, warmed by the Sun, and...
Spiral Aurora over Icelandic Divide
Birthday · July 30, 2023
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APOD published July 30, 2023. Credit: Juan Carlos Casado. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of a great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. In 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that it created the Carrington Event. This assault from the Sun compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that it created high currents and sparks along telegraph wires, shocking many telegraph operators. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged in 2016 over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator
Image credit: Juan Carlos Casado