• Aurora Australis Warms Up the Antarctic Sky

    By Lauren Davis, 2:40 PM on Tue Aug 18 2009, 4,153 views

    Photos of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, have become a common enough sight, but a less frequently seen phenomenon is their Southern cousin, the Aurora Australis, which create a spectacular light show over the Antarctic desert.

    Like the Aurora Borealis, the Aurora Australis occurs when solar winds carry charged particles from the sun into our atmosphere, where it reacts with the Earth's magnetic field. These particular images come from Antarctica's Amundsen-Scott Station, home of the South Pole Telescope. Keith Vanderlinde of the National Science Foundation took these photos of the Aurora against the unusually clear Antarctic Skies.

    [National Science Foundation via Sci-Fi-O-Rama]

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    Send an email to Lauren Davis, the author of this post, at lauren@io9.com.

    By Lauren Davis
    Aug 18, 2009 2:40 PM 4,153
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    Aurora Australis Warms Up the Antarctic Sky

    read more: #spaceporn, #aurora, #auroraaustralis, #antarctica, #southernlights, #nationalsciencefoundation, #southpoletelescope