In shimmering, rippling waves of green, Mother Nature's most spectacular show lights up the night sky. Captured in the Arctic Circle above the still waters of a lake, it is an undeniably awe-inspiring display. The haunting beauty of the Northern Lights - known as aurora borealis - is caused by massive explosions in the sun which send streams of electrically charged particles 3 million miles to the Earth. When the solar wind smashes into the upper atmosphere, the particles are swept towards the poles by the Earth's magnetic field, where they react with atoms in the atmosphere. The display was captured early yesterday morning by Øystein Lunde Ingvaldsen, who grabbed his camera when he saw what was happening outside his window at Bø in Vesterålen, Norway. The colours in the aurora come from specific atoms and molecules in the atmosphere. Green, as here, comes from oxygen molecules excited by geomagnetic activity. Other remarkable images showing a ferocious solar flare as it loops out from the surface of the Sun were also released this week. The ring of fire, heated to tens of millions of degrees, stretches out tens of thousands of miles.The pictures were taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) - the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the Sun. Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the plasma eruption was propelled into space but was not travelling in the direction of Earth where it could have disrupted telecommunications and satellites (Daily Mail)
