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Amazing auroras: Mother Nature's stunning light show
95 million miles from the Earth, the sun erupts in spectacular solar flares -- and here on Earth, we are dazzled by auroras that dance and twist across the face of the planet.
- April 24, 2012: Tiny specks of light twinkle from a lonely freighter (dead center). For more of Shawn Malone's stunning photography, go to LakeSuperiorPhoto.com.read moreShawn Malone/LakeSuperiorPhoto.comShare
- April 22, 2012: An aurora and the Milky Way. For more stunning photography by Shawn Malone, go to LakeSuperiorPhoto.com.read moreShawn Malone/LakeSuperiorPhoto.comShare
- April 22, 2012: A meteor streaks across the sky. See more at LakeSuperiorPhoto.com.read moreShawn Malone/LakeSuperiorPhoto.comShare
- These Northern Lights were very faint to the human eye, but vivid to the camera. Photographer Mike Hillingshead describes how he captured it in Little Sioux, Iowa: “If one didn’t know what they were looking for they’d never have known they were there. With a camera it makes it easy to be sure. For a couple hours, I was readily picking up the red/purple higher up while the near horizon area was full of clouds. Got a cap and could see green through it and was then I was sure.”read moreMike HillingsheadShare
- “The Northern Lights were out last night from about 11 to midnight. At times they were bright and well defined. This picture was shot at Elbow Lake near Grand Marais, Minnesota. Even with the streaks, you can still make out the shape of the big dipper pointing right to the North Star.” – Photographer Bryan Hanselread moreBryan HanselShare
- The solar event caused a beautiful light show for Shawn Malone of Marquette, Mich. He captured this picture over Lake Superior; there's a green hue because of oxygen emissions in the atmosphere. Nitrogen emissions would produce a blue or red glow depending on the state of the atoms.read moreShawn Malone / Lake Superior PhotoShare
- "We drove up into the woods in hope that we would be able to photograph the aurora that was supposed to appear all over southern Norway," writes a photographer from Oslo. "When we reached our destination the skies where partially clouded but is seemed to be getting clearer." Looks like it cleared up well enough to capture this stunning shot.read moreTrym Norman Sannes / SpaceWeatherShare
- "Miraculously, the fog disappeared as fast is it had arrived," explained Norwegian photographer Trym Norman Sannes. "Just a short time later as I was photographing the rising moon I saw a green ray of northern light on my cameras LCD. After this it just got more intense."read moreTrym Norman Sannes / SpaceWeatherShare
- Much of the U.S. was cloudy, but some photographers lucked out -- like Travis Novitsky. "Well, the aurora made a pretty good showing last night! It sounds like most everyone in Minnesota had cloudy skies, but lucky for me the clouds didn't move in to my area until after the aurora faded."read moreTravis Novitsky / SpaceWeatherShare
- "These images were all captured between 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m," explains Minnesotan photographer Travis Novitsky. "At about 11:45 I noticed the moon was coming up, so I made a couple of exposures of the moon as well as the northern lights." The results are stunning.read moreTravis Novitsky / SpaceWeatherShare
- In northern latitudes, the effect is known as the aurora borealis, named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for the north wind, Boreas. The solar event caused skies to light up from the U.S. to Denmark, where this spectacular view of an aurora was taken.read moreJesper GrønneShare
- This extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the sun's northern hemisphere in mid-eruption amidst a tumult of activity: a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism, shaking of the corona, radio bursts and a coronal mass ejection.read moreNASAShare
- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped this X-ray photo of the Sun early in the morning of Sunday, August 1. The dark arc near the top right edge of the image is a filament of plasma blasting off the surface -- the "coronal mass ejection" that led to the auroras. The bright region is an unassociated solar flare.read moreNASAShare
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Amazing auroras: Mother Nature's stunning light show
95 million miles from the Earth, the sun erupts in spectacular solar flares -- and here on Earth, we are dazzled by auroras that dance and twist across the face of the planet.
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- Amazing auroras: Mother Nature's stunning light show
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