March 22, 2022
The constellations may be old, but the person celebrating beneath them is gloriously new by cosmic standards.
A Whale of an Aurora over Swedish Forest
Birthday · March 22, 2022
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APOD published March 22, 2022. Credit: Göran Strand. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun earlier this month, throwing a cloud of fast-moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Part of this cloud impacted our Earth's magnetosphere and, bolstered by a sudden gap, resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at some high northern latitudes. Featured here is a particularly photogenic auroral corona captured above a forest in Sweden from a scenic perch overlooking the city of Östersund. To some, this shimmering green glow of recombining atmospheric oxygen might appear like a large whale, but feel free to share what it looks like to you. The unusually quiet Sun of the past few years has now passed. As our Sun now approaches a solar maximum in its 11-year solar magnetic cycle, dramatic auroras like this are sure to continue. Open Science: Browse 2,700+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library
Image credit: Göran Strand