Unless you are actively giving CPR to an accident victim at this very moment, drop whatever you are doing and watch this stunning, mind-blowing time lapse video of the Earth at night, taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station:

Holy. Haleakala. Make sure that’s set to HD and make it full screen.

The video, taken by astronauts and edited by Michael König, was from a high-resolution camera with low-light abilities, so it can see faint sources of light. The footage was all taken from August to October 2011.

I’m so overwhelmed by the beauty and coolness of this video I’m not sure which part I like best! The cities streaming by underneath; the instantly recognizable outlines of familiar places like the Great Lakes or the boot of Italy; the incredible flickering thunderstorms — giving you an understanding that there are always thousands of such storms all over the planet at any one time; the incredible 3D view of the green and red aurorae which you can actually see as towering structures dozens or even hundreds kilometers in height; the stars rising and setting and spinning over the horizon; the reflection of the Moon on the Earth below following along our point of view at 2:50 into the footage; or the thin glowing arc above the horizon: airglow, caused by molecules in the upper atmosphere slowly emitting light as they release energy accumulated during the day.

It’s all fantastic.

There have been plenty of beautiful time lapse videos of the Earth from the ISS — most notably, one from September — but this sets a new standard. Not the least of which because it’s so smooth; the sense of motion, the sense of flying, is overpowering. But the sheer magnificence of the entire video is simply incredible.

Credit: NASA, Michael König, who used photos from NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of the Earth site.

In the past few months the Sun has come roaring back to life, blasting out flares and fierce waves of subatomic particles. These space storms are caused by the magnetic field of the Sun, which stores huge amounts of energy. Near sunspots the magnetic field lines get tangled and can suddenly erupt, hurling that energy into space.

If these tsunamis of particles head our way, they interact with our own planet’s magnetic field. Through complicated processes, the particles are focused down into our atmosphere, where they light it up (literally) like a neon sign. The result: aurorae, also called the northern (or southern) lights.

During a recent storm, photographer Dave Brosha was up in Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, which is at a latitude of 62° north, not all that far south of the Arctic Circle. The aurora display that night was, well, unearthly. He got some amazing shots, including this one:

[Click to stimulatedemissionate.]

Wow. That’s breathtaking. The silhouette belongs to photographer Thomas Koidhis, also a Canadian from the NWT. The stream of green aurora is simple amazing, like a solid path you could walk right into the sky. The Milky Way hangs as a backdrop, the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra punctuating the glowing stream.

He has many more such gorgeous shots in his Flickr set, and I particularly like this one, which shows the ribbons and curved streamers of the lights, caused by the curves in the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many more times in the future: people who say science takes away the magic of reality are wrong. The aurorae are among the most beautiful and amazing sights that nature has to offer, and their beauty is enhanced, magnified, by knowing what it is that causes them.

Knowing is half the fun. The other half? Finding out.

Credit: Dave Brosha, used by permission.

A few days ago, the Sun unleashed a blast of subatomic particles, a massive wave of plasma that swept out into space at speeds of millions of kilometers per hour. On Monday, October 24th, that coronal mass ejection slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field, compressing it, and causing a secondary wave of particles to cascade down into Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. These particles struck molecules in the air, ionizing them, which then glowed fiercely as electrons recombined with their parent atoms exciting the electrons in atoms, and when the electrons give up that energy the atoms glow.

In English? Tremendously bright northern lights! Check this out:

That was taken by photographer Eric Hines on the shore of Lake Michigan last night. You can see the glow reflecting in the water! Another photographer, Randy Halverson, took an amazing shot as well and said the aurorae were "insanely" bright, and on his website commented they were so bright it was hard to get them exposed correctly. Universe Today has a lot more pictures as well.

Aurorae were reported as far south as North Carolina and Arkansas! This was a big magnetic event, larger than we’ve seen in some time. It’s already dying down, but you never know: there may be some activity tonight. It never hurts to go outside and look to the north. If you don’t look, then you’re guaranteed not to see anything.

Image credit: Eric Hines, used by permission

I got a few emails about this while on vacation, and APOD just posted it too, but what the heck: a gorgeous timelapse video of aurorae (northern lights) over Norway:

This one was done by Terje Sorgjerd, and is quite lovely. Another great timelapse aurora video can be found at Lights in the Dark, too. I still have never seen a good display myself in person (just a smear of red light to the north once when I lived in Maryland), but one day I will. One day.

Yesterday I posted a few pictures from Monday night’s lunar eclipse — including a really cool one of the Moon and the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery — but of the many hundreds I saw, I think I may have a new favorite:

Sigh. How lovely! Click to enaurorenate.

It was taken by Francis Anderson, who has posted quite a few others, too. The location was Tuktoyaktuk, in the Canadian Northwest Territories. This is a small town located at the bone-chilling latitude of 69° north, inside the Arctic Circle. That explains the visibility of the gorgeous aurora borealis, the glow from solar subatomic particles as they slam into our atmosphere. Guided by the Earth’s magnetic field to the geomagnetic poles near the north and south geographic poles, these particles shear electrons off the molecules and atoms of air, causing it to glow.

But what are those columns of light reaching up from the horizon? (more…)

Use the thumbnails and arrows to browse the images, and click on the images themselves to go through to blog posts with more details and descriptions.

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Cassini keeps amazing me, even when I start to think I’m getting used to incredible images beamed back from Saturn.

But this is new: it took several images of Saturn’s aurora, and strung them together to make a video! Here’s a still frame:

The outline of Saturn is there, along with some latitude lines for reference (the bright thin wedge is the daylit side of the planet itself). You can see stars blurred in the background, with the aurora the orangey glow rising about the Saturnian cloud deck. This frame is cool, but for frak’s sake go watch the video! It’s mesmerizing. I’d put it here, but it’s 3 Mb and that would destroy the Hive Overmind servers.

The images put together to create the animation were taken over four days. Interestingly (well, to me anyway) these images were taken in visible light; we already know from Hubble observations that Saturn’s aurorae are bright in UV.

These northern lights on Saturn are formed in pretty much the same way they are on Earth: particles in the Sun’s solar wind get captured in the magnetic field of the planet, and are swept to the poles where they slam into molecules in the atmosphere, lighting it up (literally) like a neon sign. The details are far more complicated, of course, but that’s the basic picture. The images from Cassini don’t show color, which is too bad: the color of the glow can tell you what chemical elements are in the atmosphere, since different atoms emit at different wavelengths. Still, there is much to be learned about Saturn’s magnetic field from images like these.

And may I add: wow. Aurorae, from a billion kilometers away. Incredible!