(ORDO NEWS) — The Sun has been in an absolutely wild rotation of late, and one of the results of its continued activity is a spectacular aurora.
The last days of February were marked by streaks of green light undulating across the high latitude sky. But those of us on the planet’s surface weren’t the only ones enjoying this amazing light show.
Hundreds of kilometers above our planet, the astronauts also enjoyed the rare spectacle of the auroras from a unique perspective.
Pictures taken by astronauts Josh Kassada of NASA and Koichi Wasada of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency aboard the International Space Station show the aurora borealis flickering green against the natural golden glow of Earth‘s night sky.
Earth’s sky is never completely dark, even at night, even once you’ve taken out all the contributions of light pollution, starlight and diffused sunlight.
At night, this soft glow is called nightglow, and it occurs when molecules separated by solar radiation during the day recombine, releasing their excess energy in the form of photons. Night lights are here all the time.
Aurora, on the other hand, is more situational.
This occurs when solar wind particles collide with the Earth’s magnetic field and are carried away, accelerating along magnetic field lines to high latitudes near the north or south poles, where they rain down into the upper atmosphere.
There they interact with atmospheric particles; these interactions give rise to dancing green lights flickering across the sky.
The sun is always emitting streams of charged particles; however, it is not until particularly strong winds, following a solar flare, that enough interactions occur to cause visible light shows, sometimes as far as mid-latitudes.
Particularly active in the last year or two, the Sun erupts a large number of powerful flares as it approaches the peak of its normal 11-year activity cycle.
February was an exciting month with several powerful M and X class flares, the most powerful flare categories our Sun emits.
Although the current cycle is significantly stronger than official forecasts, the Sun’s activity is still in a relatively normal range, so there is nothing particularly alarming about its behavior.
A particularly powerful flare can cause a geomagnetic storm that can disrupt satellite and radio communications and damage electrical networks. It looks like nothing like this is on the horizon.
However, it looks like we’re in for an absolutely incredible aurora season.
Enthusiastic aurora hunters can keep up to date with NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center forecasts and Australian Bureau of Meteorological Bureau aurora forecasts for the southern hemisphere.
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