The northern light are doubtless one of Earth’smost stunning sight , but if you really want to indulge in their aerial beauty , then there are few better advantage dot than the International Space Station ( ISS ) .
NASArecently sharedthe time - lapse video below as part of its Image of the Day lineament , and ascertain auroras never gets previous . The stunning footage was flash on September 28 , 2017 , as the International Space Station made a strait from the northern Pacific Ocean , just in the south of Alaska , to the Gulf of Mexico , south of Florida . The sky over Canada are lit up with greenish lilac - tinct ribbons of visible radiation , flickering with an other - worldly glow . As the ISS derive down North America , the northern lights slice , but you might be able to spot a few cities in the US , including Chicago , Nashville , and Atlanta , before reaching the pitch - grim Atlantic .
“ The time - backsliding imagery that we ’ve been able to get of auroras is just fascinating to watch , ” Will Stefanov , ISS program scientist for Earth notice at Johnson Space Center , toldNASA Earth Observatory . “ And just strikingly beautiful to be capable to see that unconscious process , how the aurora shift and moves like a live thing . And knowing that for that particular stretchiness of time , you are pretty much watch what the crew saw in orbit . ”
In the Northern Hemisphere , the aurora borealis , or " northern lights " are the production of cosmic forces journeying across the Solar System and collide with Earth . Electrically charged speck are spat out of the Sun ’s corona , its upper atmosphere , and movement through the Solar System in the form ofsolar lead . Once the charged corpuscle from the Sun hit Earth ’s magnetosphere , they release energy and excite gases in our upper atmospheric state . The excitement have ionization of the atmospheric speck and the tone ending of light photons . O produces green and yellow light , while atomic number 7 creates ruddy and dismal light .
They are most clear image near Earth ’s pole , most notably in the Northern Hemisphere , but theaurora australisis also understand in the depth of the Southern Hemisphere too , due to thegeomagnetic field around the planet . The magnetic landing field will ab initio deflect the charged particles , causing them to flow around the major planet and remove near the polar region where the magnetized landing field is weakest .
There ’s still much to watch about this unbelievable phenomenon . Just last year , a team of citizen scientists , aurora - hunt photographers , and space physicists described apreviously undocumented anatomy of northern lightsin southwest Finland .
