Aurora & Noctilucent Clouds over Alaska | Earth Science
"And so it begins . . . While photographing noctilucent clouds around Glennallen, Alaska, at 2:40 am on August 7, 2026, a cute green aurora band photobombed the twilight scene. Love it when that happens! Especially since these are the first 'lights' I've spotted as darkness slowly falls across the northland. And after eight straight hours of negative/southward Bz interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), I’m glad Earth’s magnetic field finally coupled with the solar wind for this brief cameo appearance. Aurora game on."
Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), or night shining clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere. They consist of ice crystals and from the ground are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between ±50° and ±70°. Too faint to be seen in daylight, they are visible only when the observer and the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow while these very high clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggest that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor through chemical reactions once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere—creating, or reinforcing existing, noctilucent clouds.
Also known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), auroras are colorful, dynamic, and often visually delicate displays of an intricate dance of particles and magnetism between the Sun and Earth called space weather. When energetic particles from space collide with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, they can cause the colorful glow that we call auroras.
Alaska is a non-contiguous U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. Part of the Western United States region, it is one of the two non-contiguous U.S. states, alongside Hawaii. Alaska is considered to be the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost state in the United States. It borders the Canadian territory of the Yukon and the province of British Columbia to the east. It shares a western maritime border in the Bering Strait with Russia. The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas of the Arctic Ocean lie to the north, and the Pacific Ocean lies to the south.
Image Credit: Todd Salat
Location: Glennallen, Alaska
#NASA #Space #Science #Sun #Planets #Earth #Aurora #AuroaBorealis #Weather #Meteorology #Atmosphere #WaterVapor #Clouds #IceCrystals #NoctilucentClouds #NLCs #PolarMesosphericClouds #Astrophotography #Astrophotographers #ToddSalat #CitizenScience #Alaska #UnitedStates #STEM #Education
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