Aurora Illumination

The Northern Lights have been particularly amazing this fall in arctic areas, to the extent that satellites capturing nighttime imagery actually detected the surface of the Earth—illuminated by the intense aurora.

Here is that remarkable imagery, via NASA Visible Earth…

You can actually spot the topographic relief, particularly in southern Alaska and Yukon Territory (one of my very favorite places in the world).

Auroras are pretty intense and the colors are a ghostly aqua. I’ve spent many dark nights in Michigan looking up in awe at an ethereal dancing light show as charged solar particles excite the thin upper atmosphere. Here is an enviable look from above, from the perspective of the International Space Station…

I wanted to take the actual satellite-captured imagery of the vaporous auroral band and mask the underlying autumn imagery below, to conjure some impressionistic sense of the ions lighting up the cold land below…

Here is a brief how-to with source project and data.

Happy Cool Nights! John