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Nature Science

AURORA BOREALIS: LAUNCHING INTO A NEW DAWNING NOW

Courtesy of Ronn & Marketa Murray.
by Ronn & Marketa Murray.

Aurora, the goddess of dawn, is all about beautiful starts. The eponymous Aurora Borealis is like dawn on an acid trip, with intensely beautiful, often psychedelic colors and patterns seen nowhere else on Earth. A new quest is underway to learn more about its forces.

While people have observed the dramatic artistry of the celestial Aurora for millennia, there is still a lot we don’t know about them.

We know that the Aurora is a manifestation of electromagnetically (EM) charged particles dancing through the atmosphere under very specific conditions.

NASA recently initiated a program to study the electromagnetic fields and forces impacting our planet, with a series of sounding, or research, rockets launched into the Aurora over Norway.

The aim is to study how particles move near the North Pole, where Earth’s magnetic field is directly connected to the solar wind. The study is helping to illustrate how the high frequency EM waves accelerate the particles to more than a million cycles per second.

The rockets are outfitted with special instruments to study phenomena related to the cusp aurora, a particular subset of the Northern Lights in which electromagnetic waves and particles flow out of the sun, downward towards Earth. When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they form cusp auroras.

Because the magnetic North Pole is offset from the geographic North Pole, you might be able to see cusp auroras in Northern Europe near the winter solstice, when night is the longest and skies are the darkest.

Husband and wife Ronn & Marketa Murray are a team of nature and travel photographers who met and fell in love thanks to their mutual passion for the Aurora. Their photos of the early launches are breathtakingly beautiful.

Check out more of Ronn and Marketa’s magnificent Aurora photos here. Better yet, join them on one of their amazing Aurora Tours.

Check out this video of the launch! And see more amazing images from Ronn & Marketa’s portfolio here.

Read more about Beautiful Starts/Restarts, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Beautiful Ideas & Images For the Start of a Beautiful New Year.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

  1. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray.
  2. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray.
  3. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray.
  4. Image: by Jamie Adkins, for NASA. Time Lapse Photo of NASA Oriole IV Sounding Rocket with Aural Spatial Structures Probe as an Aurora Dances over Alaska.
  5. Image: by Jason Ahrns. Tonight's Launch.
  6. Image: by Lee Wingfield, for NASA.
  7. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray.
  8. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray.
  9. Image: by Ronn Murray. The Crown Jewel.
  10. Image: by Jamie Adkins, for NASA. Composite Shot of All Four Rockets for the M-TeX & MIST Experiments from the Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska.
  11. Image: by Ronn & Marketa Murray. Engaged under the Lights!
  12. Image: by BN App - Download now!
  13. Image: by Ronn Murray. Aurora Tent Cabin.
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