October 16, 2024
The cosmos is full of spectacular things: ringed planets, exploding suns, rivers of stars across the night.
Colorful Aurora over New Zealand
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APOD published October 16, 2024. Credit: Tristian McDonald. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Sometimes the night sky is full of surprises. Take the sky over Lindis Pass, South Island, New Zealand one-night last week. Instead of a typically calm night sky filled with constant stars, a busy and dynamic night sky appeared. Suddenly visible were pervasive red aurora, green picket-fence aurora, a red SAR arc, a STEVE, a meteor, and the Moon. These outshone the center of our Milky Way Galaxy and both of its two satellite galaxies: the LMC and SMC. All of these were captured together on 28 exposures in five minutes, from which this panorama was composed. Auroras lit up many skies last week, as a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun unleashed a burst of particles toward our Earth that created colorful skies over latitudes usually too far from the Earth's poles to see them. More generally, night skies this month have other surprises, showing not only auroras -- but comets. Jigsaw Challenge: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day
Image credit: Tristian McDonald