The red-yellow flashes of the southern auroras

When on 19 April the interplanetary shock reached the Earth's magnetic field, the sky of the Northern hemisphere was covered by a blue Aurora. Southern sky also lit up, but the palette was different. Peter Sayers took this picture of heaven, illuminated red, green and yellow, near the town of Wilmot in Tasmania in Australia.

He said that the lights could be seen with the naked eye for 1-2 hours. Sayers said that he used the process only to remove noise in the photo, but the color saturation in the photo has not been altered and remained the same. Flashes the same colors seen in New Zealand, while observers in the Antarctic have seen the glow green color.

In the North the auroras dominated by ionized nitrogen molecules, which led to the blue glow in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. Southern auroras were associated with the excitation of oxygen atoms. Oxygen atoms glow red and green during the interaction with cosmic particles. However, not all so is simple — oxygen and nitrogen are present in abundance in both hemispheres, so why not somewhere dominated by one or the other? It remains a mystery.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»