My obsession!
:)
Arctic Shine
Photograph by Max Edin, Your Shot
Earth's most famous light formation hangs over a landscape saturated by the glow of a full moon in Longyearbyen, Norway. The photographer, who recently submitted this image to National Geographic's Your Shot, said it was the most beautiful northern lights display he had ever witnessed.
Referred to as the
aurora borealis around the Arctic Circle, the light show also appears in southern polar latitudes, where it's known as the aurora australis. In addition, the naturally occurring phenomenon has been spied on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. (See
"Auroras Seen on Uranus For First Time.")
Green light is the most common for Earthly auroras, but blue and red hues also appear from time to time. (Kastalia Medrano).
Stardust
Photograph by Kwon O. Chul, TWAN
Far above Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, the band of the Milky Way cuts through a sky dusted with stars. This recently released photo, a single frame from a time lapse video, was taken near the town of Moshi on Kilimanjaro's lower southern slopes.
The smaller, almost opalescent blur on the left of the frame is the Small Magellanic Cloud-a dwarf galaxy far, far away that's home to hundreds of millions of stars.
Dynamic Earth
Illustration courtesy SVS/NASA, U. Illinois, Thomas Lucas Productions, DMNS
Solar particles get bent as they sweep around Earth's magnetic field, as seen in a still from a new NASA planetarium show called Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine.
The image shows the full scale of a coronal mass ejection, an eruption of charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere.
When the particles reach Earth, they can interact with our planet to produce the northern and southern lights. Under the right conditions, CMEs can trigger especially intense solar storms that can damage satellites or cause power outages.
Stellar Nursery
Image courtesy VLT/ESO
Awash in gritty, pinkish light, this image is the best view to date of the lively stellar nursery known as NGC 6357. The newly released visible-light picture was made by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
Swaths of color represent glowing dust and gas clouds, while dots of blue and white light show the hot young stars growing inside the nebula.
NGC 6357 is also called the War and Peace Nebula, due to the fantastical shapes of a skull and a dove that seem to appear in infrared images of the cosmic cloud. Located within the constellation Scorpius, the nebula lies about 8,000 light-years from Earth.
"Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable."
(Isaiah 40:28)
XoXo,
Lindsay
