May 20, 2005
You were born into motion: oceans turning, continents drifting, clouds forming, planets circling, galaxies wheeling through the dark.
Aurora Iowa
Birthday · May 20, 2005
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APOD published May 20, 2005. Credit: Stan Richard. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
rly last Sunday morning stars were not the only lights in Iowa skies. The northern lights also shone from the heavens, extending across the midwestern USA and other locations not often graced with auroral displays. The wide-ranging auroral activity was triggered as a coronal mass ejection - an energetic cloud of particles blasted outward from the Sun a few days earlier - collided with planet Earth's magnetosphere. Alerted to conditions ripe for aurora, photographer Stan Richard recorded this aparition over Saylorville Lake, near Des Moines. Bright planet Mars in the constellation Aquarius is above the horizon near the center of the eastward-looking view. While the colorful rays seem to end just above the water, they are actually at altitudes of 100 kilometers or more.
Image credit: Stan Richard