June 1, 2015
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
Pulsating Aurora over Iceland
Birthday · June 1, 2015
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APOD published June 1, 2015 · Video still. Credit: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées); Music: Eric Aron. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Why do some auroras pulsate? No one is sure. Although this unusual behavior has been known for a long time, the cause remains an active topic of research. Featured here is a dramatic video that captured some impressive pulsating auroras in mid-March over Sv�nafellsj�kull Glacier in Iceland. The 48-second video shown is not time-lapse. The real-time pulsations are exemplified by sequences where the astrophotographer is visible moving about in the foreground. A close inspection of the enigmatic flickering sky colors reveals that some structures appear to repeat, while others do not. The quick rapidity of the pulsations seen here is somewhat unusual -- more common are aurora with pulsations that last several seconds. Recent research shows that pulsations are more common in electron-generated aurora, rather than proton aurora, and that the Earth's local magnetic field may fluctuate in unison. Astrophysicists: Browse 1,000+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library
Image credit: Stéphane Vetter (Nuits sacrées); Music: Eric Aron