Stunning new images of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, have been released by Nasa after they were captured by the International Space Station.
The US space agency has taken numerous images of the Northern Lights over the years, but these are the first "moving" pictures ever seen.
Made by combining hundreds of photographs taken by digital cameras on-board the International Space Station, the results are some of the clearest, highest resolution images of space ever seen.
The recent spate of time-lapse videos – each requiring at least 500 images to produce the sense of movement – emanating from Nasa owes in large part to a single scientist who began stringing together the digital images last August.
Melissa Dawson stumbled upon the idea when she saw pictures taken from the ISS as it passed along the eastern coast of North and South America.
"They sent down something looking over North America going down to South America and you know, I saw the images coming down and it looked like they had mounted a camera in the cupola or another window, and they started taking a picture every three seconds or every five seconds and I put it together just to see what it would look like and it came out spectacular," she said.
Auroras form when a "solar wind" of charged electrical particles from the Sun enters Earth's magnetic field, accelerating electrically charged particles trapped within.
The high-speed particles then crash into Earth's upper atmosphere over the polar regions, causing the atmosphere to emit a ghostly, multicoloured glow.
Source
The US space agency has taken numerous images of the Northern Lights over the years, but these are the first "moving" pictures ever seen.
Made by combining hundreds of photographs taken by digital cameras on-board the International Space Station, the results are some of the clearest, highest resolution images of space ever seen.
The recent spate of time-lapse videos – each requiring at least 500 images to produce the sense of movement – emanating from Nasa owes in large part to a single scientist who began stringing together the digital images last August.
Melissa Dawson stumbled upon the idea when she saw pictures taken from the ISS as it passed along the eastern coast of North and South America.
"They sent down something looking over North America going down to South America and you know, I saw the images coming down and it looked like they had mounted a camera in the cupola or another window, and they started taking a picture every three seconds or every five seconds and I put it together just to see what it would look like and it came out spectacular," she said.
Auroras form when a "solar wind" of charged electrical particles from the Sun enters Earth's magnetic field, accelerating electrically charged particles trapped within.
The high-speed particles then crash into Earth's upper atmosphere over the polar regions, causing the atmosphere to emit a ghostly, multicoloured glow.
Source
TIME LAPSE of the NORTHERN LIGHTS from SPACE (NASA Video)
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