What a sight to behold, when a night sky became filled with colors that appeared to rain over the Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland.
This image was taken in a single
5 second exposure by the photographer in April 2025.
Seeing an
aurora is on many people's bucket lists.
But it is not easy.
It requires high
solar activity, dark and clear skies, and usually a viewing location at high latitude.
That makes the northern lights more easily seen than the corresponding
southern lights, simply because there is less landmass in the Southern Hemisphere, especially
around the Antarctic Circle.
Auroras are caused by charged particles from the
solar wind that are captured by the Earth's
magnetosphere and guided by the magnetic field to a region close to one of the poles, where they collide with gas particles in the
atmosphere.
Different colors indicate interactions with different gases at
different altitudes, like oxygen (
red and
green) and nitrogen (
blue and
pink).