English: An astronaut took this photograph of the Aurora Australis in August 2017. At the time, the International Space Station was moving over the southern Indian Ocean towards the Great Australian Bight and Melbourne, Australia. Click here to see a video of the flight over the aurora.
Auroras are created in the upper atmosphere when the solar wind (a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun) interacts with the Earth’s protective magnetic field. Charged particles within the magnetosphere are accelerated down field lines toward the ionosphere, where they collide with different gases (particularly oxygen and nitrogen) and emit light as a reaction. Auroras often appear as neon green, purple, yellow, or red, depending on the gas molecules being excited. Green, for example, indicates collisions with oxygen.
Astronaut photograph ISS052-E-63378 was acquired on August 19, 2017
The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the
Soviet/
Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain.
The
SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use.
[2]
{{Information |Description ={{en|1=An astronaut took this photograph of the Aurora Australis in August 2017. At the time, the International Space Station was moving over the southern Indian Ocean towards the Great Australian Bight and Melbourne, Aus...
File usage
The following pages on the English Wikipedia use this file (pages on other projects are not listed):