Environment
A Satellite Captures Shimmering Auroras Over America
The northern lights look cool enough from below, but what about above?
Seen from the ground, the aurora borealis is a mighty sight—like being slapped in the eyes with a writhing rainbow. But glimpsed from space the vision is also top-rate, in this case painting America with ghostly streams of light.
The Suomi NPP satellite took the above image around 2:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday as a powerful coronal mass ejection buffeted the atmosphere. During this so-called St. Patrick's Day Geomagnetic Storm, snaking emanations sometimes dipped below the Canadian border to caress Minnesota, North Dakota, and Illinois. Scott Bachmeier of the University of Wisconsin-Madison tweeted this view of the spectral invasion: