It is a phenomenon that many of you only know from photos and have never had the good fortune to see in person. We are talking about the Northern Lightswhich occurs when charged particles from the Sun interact with our atmosphere, resulting in a dazzling display of color in the sky.
If many of you haven’t had the good fortune to see her in person, take comfort in knowing that very few people in the world will see her as the astronaut by NASA Josh Cassada, who recently witnessed an aurora from the International Space Station (and you can see the photo as always at the bottom of the news).
“Absolutely unreal,” the man in space captioned the photo. The image clearly shows the curvature of the Earth at night, with a turquoise-green haze covering the horizon; a truly out of this world experience – literally – that only the luckiest space travelers have witnessed.
This because not all astronauts can see the northern lights and these days it is especially visible as the Sun is approaching the peak of its 11-year cycle activity. Solar winds, triggered by coronal mass ejections, have already blasted large amounts of plasma in our planet’s atmosphere, and while a powerful geomagnetic storm was triggered in the UK, Earth was surrounded by these lights spectacular.