March 16, 2020

Two of Earth’s most colourful upper atmospheric phenomena, aurora and airglow, fulfilled just in advance of dawn in this image shot by an astronaut on the International House Station (ISS). Wavy green, red-topped wisps of aurora borealis surface to intersect the muted pink-yellow band of airglow as the ISS handed just south of the Alaskan Peninsula. The rising Solar, powering Earth’s limb at the time of this photo, provides a deep blue to the horizon. Light from towns in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, joins starlight to dot the early morning skyscape.

While they show up at comparable altitudes, aurora and airglow are manufactured by distinctive physical processes. Nighttime airglow (or nightglow) is a variety of chemiluminescence—the emission of light from chemical interactions concerning oxygen, nitrogen, and other molecules in the upper atmosphere. Airglow happens all all around the Earth, all the time. Nonetheless, “nightglow” is significantly much easier to spot about a darkish Earth than “dayglow,” as airglow is just one billionth as brilliant as the Sunlight.

Auroras, on the other hand, stem from interactions amongst photo voltaic strength and Earth’s magnetic subject. The magnetic discipline funnels the electricity into the upper atmosphere, exactly where it interacts with the identical atoms as airglow (generally oxygen and nitrogen). This is why equally phenomena can generate related shades. The dynamic character of Earth’s magnetic industry moves the solar vitality in irregular techniques, leading to each individual aurora event to be visually one of a kind.

A short while ago, the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA’s Johnson Place Middle made use of machine learning to establish all of the shots that astronauts have taken of auroras around the earlier handful of many years. Look for the Gateway to Astronaut Photograph of Earth databases for “aurora” to see more than 270,000 pictures of these magnetic marvels.

Astronaut photograph ISS062-E-98264 was obtained on March 16, 2020, with a Nikon D5 electronic camera employing a 50-millimeter lens and is furnished by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Room Centre. The picture was taken by a member of the Expedition 62 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to boost contrast, and lens artifacts have been taken out. The Worldwide Space Station System supports the laboratory as section of the ISS National Lab to assist astronauts consider shots of Earth that will be of the best worth to researchers and the general public, and to make these visuals freely out there on the Online. Additional photos taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Images of Earth. Caption by Alex Stoken, Jacobs, JETS Deal at NASA-JSC.