Dragons may be make-believe, but a dragon-shaped aurora borealis that flickered in the sky over Iceland this month was breathtakingly real — just have a look at this dramatic photograph. - NBCNewsMACH
when fast-moving charged particles from the sun strike Earth's magnetic field, colliding with oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules in Earth's upper atmosphere, exciting them and causing them to release particles of light known as photons.
Because these collisions are focused by Earth's magnetic field at the North and South poles, they're most commonly seen in high northern and southern latitudes. In the Northern Hemisphere, they're known as aurora borealis or the northern lights; in the Southern Hemisphere, they're called aurora australis or the southern lights.
, like the dragon-shaped one, but they can also be shades of red, blue, violet, pink and white. They're too faint to be seen in daylight. At night, some are quite dim but others are bright enough to read by.on Earth and satellite operations in space."So the solar storms can benefit the auroras ... but hurt some kinds of long-distance communications," Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, said in an email.
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