Colorful Aurora over Iceland
Image Credit & Copyright: Sigurdur William Brynjarsson; Annotation Advice: Sævar Helgi Bragason
Explanation: You don't always see a scene this beautiful when you hike to an ancient volcano -- you have to be lucky. When
the astrophotographer realized that
aurora were visible two-weeks ago, he made a night-time run for the top of the caldera to see if he could capture them also reflected in the central lake. When he arrived, he found that ... the northern lights were even brighter and more impressive than before! And
his image of them is the featured 13-frame panoramic mosaic. The
crater lake in the center is called
Kerid (Icelandic: Kerið) and is about 3,000 years old. The
aurora overhead shows impressive
colors and
banding, with the red colors occurring higher in the
Earth's atmosphere than the
green. The background sky is filled with icons of the northern night including
Polaris, the
Pleiades star cluster, and the stars that compose the handle of the
Big Dipper.
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