Northern Lights From Space: NASA Astronaut Captures Ethereal Green Aurora Over Earth

While aurora can typically only be viewed from Earth, lucky astronauts in the International Space Station (ISS) got to witness the ethereal flow from a unique angle.

In fact, one astronaut was able to capture rare footage of the stunning green aurora from space, with Earth in the background.

Aurora From Space

At the foreground is the cone-shaped Starliner capsule of the Boeing. This was supposed to have come back to Earth by now.

Matthew Dominick, a NASA astronaut, was behind the filming of the footage. He filmed it aboard the ISS, which moves around the Earth roughly 250 miles above sea level. He has been aboard the station since March when he was one of the crew members of the Crew Dragon spacecraft of SpaceX.

ISS astronauts have their personal internet connection, which allows them to send emails, post on X, and do more online activities.

Dominick then took the video and an image to X, sharing that they have been viewing aurora at the cupola windows. He added that the timing was great for the green aurora to line up nicely with the service module thrusters of the Starliner.

While it is not clear where the ISS was back then, it is known that the ISS adhered to a circular path as it orbits the Earth.

The video also includes a small square window of the Starliner. It appears to be illuminated dramatically with great bursts of bright light. These are actually flashlights that fellow NASA astronauts operated.

Auroras

Auroras are produced by disturbances in the magnetosphere of the Earth because of a particle flow from the Sun. It is typically centered around the magnetic poles of the Earth, which is why they are referred to as northern or southern lights.

Such charged particles get expelled from the Sun at high speeds prior to interacting with the magnetic field of the Earth.

This mainly happens when the Sun releases coronal mass ejections, wherein it burps a huge electrified gas bubble that may move through space at incredible speeds. When solar storms near the Earth, some of the energy and particles could move through the lines of the magnetic field in the north and south poles. These could enter the atmosphere of the Earth.

While the video was able to cover green aurora, the color display mainly depends on the molecules that the charged particles get to interact with.

Green and red colors tend to signify oxygen, while red and pink colors tend to imply signs of nitrogen. Blue and purple ones typically indicate molecules of helium and hydrogen.

The Sun's constantly altering input, the varying responses from the upper atmosphere of the Earth, and the motion of particles and the planet in near-Earth space all work together to result in various auroral shapes and motions. Such shapes and motions may reveal the physics that could be happening in space along the magnetic field lines of the Earth.

Auroras are also not just unique to Earth. Other planets that have a magnetic field and atmosphere are also likely to have auroras. Such auroras have been previously observed in Saturn and Jupiter.

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