'tis the season for solar storms, and I'm hearing reports that Active Region 1504 (the same sunspot featured in a dramatic video I posted recently) has been getting feisty, blowing out some flares and causing auroral activity here on Earth. Photographer Brad Goldpaint was in the right place at the right time Saturday night to see some of this: he went to Crater Lake, Oregon, and at 3:30 a.m. local time on June 17th he took this surpassingly beautiful picture of a somewhat rare event: pink aurorae!
[Click to recombinate.] Gorgeous! And weird. The colors you see in aurorae depend mostly on what's in the air. Literally! A solar storm is an eruption of subatomic particles launched from the Sun at high speed. These interact with the Earth's magnetic field, which, through a complicated process, sends those little beasties down into our air. They slam into the molecules and atoms ...
