We’re still glowing over May’s auroras, and are excited to welcome those around the world who have newly fallen in love with the Northern and Southern Lights! One of the questions we have been receiving is, “where can I learn more?” Bibliophiles, we’ve got your back. In 2022, we wrote a post about some aurora… Read More »Cozy Aurora Reads
With special thanks to Dr. Janet Kozyra for her generous contributions to this post. After a big storm sends aurora to lower latitudes—southward in the Northern Hemisphere, and northward in the Southern Hemisphere—questions abound. One of the most common is “I thought the aurora was green. Why does it look red?” Red auroras have been… Read More »Why do auroras at lower latitudes look red?
As loved ones gathered to celebrate the winter holidays, we were thinking about the many relationships between aurora and aurora-like phenomena in the sky. In this post, we introduce the aurora and some of the amazing phenomena related to it, closely or distantly. If you have a photo and wonder which phenomena might be present… Read More »An Aurora Family Reunion
By Vincent Ledvina and Laura Edson With many thanks to aurora photographer Marybeth Kiczenski for reviewing the post As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more popular, many are using it to create content, including about auroras. While it can be useful, in a social media world that values speed, clicks, and engagement it can be hard… Read More »Keeping it Real: How to Spot a Fake Aurora Photo
One of the questions we get most often is, “how can I see the aurora?” The answer is surprisingly complicated and can be difficult to explain to students. In order to help explain, we made a collaborative, role-playing card game! With a special deck of printable cards and a dash of imagination, players work together… Read More »Aurora Chasers: The Game!
Humans have looked to the sky since time immemorial, and noticed a strange purplish arc with stripy green features that runs east to west and appears closer to the equator than regular aurora. In the mid-2010s, aurora chasers began to collectively photograph and speculate about the phenomenon, which did not yet have a formal scientific… Read More »What’s in a name? The meaning of STEVE
By Vincent Ledvina, Andy Witteman, and Laura Brandt Watching the aurora is a breathtaking experience, but unless they are very strong, the Northern Lights don’t look to the naked eye like their colorful photos. It’s not a trick of the light—just a difference in the ways eyes and camera lenses work. In Your Eyes The… Read More »Battle of the Lenses: Eyes vs. Cameras
Citizen scientists can not only contribute to discoveries, but they can also bring their unique skills to bear to make discoveries of their own and create powerful tools to advance open science. Dr. Michael Hunnekuhl is one such innovator. Among atmospheric phenomena, STEVE (which stands for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement”) is one of those… Read More »Meeting STEVE Around the World
Every community of practice evolves its own vocabulary, and scientists and science communicators often rib themselves for how jargony STEM can be. In the late 1970’s, tech film narrator Bud Haggert created the affectionately cheeky “Turbo Encabulator“, using plausible but made-up jargon to make this classic engineering sketch incomprehensible. Engineers have delighted in recreating and… Read More »Small Words, Big Ideas: Up Goer Five
They dance above the clouds but below the aurora, crimson fingers stretching up and down, bursting like fireworks then vanishing in the blink of an eye. Sprites, brief flashes of red and purple light associated with lightning, are some of the least-understood electrical phenomena in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Even though globally there are 30-100… Read More »Sprites: The Aurora’s Flashy Cousins