Starship Asterisk*

Night on a Spooky Planet

Explanation: What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth of course, on a dark and stormy night in 2013 at Hverir, a geothermally active area along the volcanic landscape in northeastern Iceland. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms produced the auroral display in the starry night sky. The ghostly towers of steam and gas are venting from fumaroles and danced against the eerie greenish light. For now, auroral apparitions are increasing as our Sun approaches a maximum in its 11 year solar activity cycle. And pretty soon, ghostly shapes may dance in your neighborhood too.

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Twas a dark and stormy night and the ghosts were having a great time dancing in the green aurora lit sky at Hverir Iceland! Wooooo! Kudos to Stephany Vetter for an amazing photo!

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 4:05 am And pretty soon, ghostly shapes may dance in your neighborhood too.

Not bloody likely.

Halloween is the perfect bah humbug holiday.
Aurorae can be (and have been?) seen by only 2% of human beings.
I suppose that may be why photographs of them are so popular, but I would guess that APOD pics of them are way more than 2% of the total historically..
Seems out-of-balance, especially since I would call them terrestrial phenomena, not astronomical.
Bah, Humbug!

Jim Armstrong wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 4:21 pm Aurorae can be (and have been?) seen by only 2% of human beings.
I suppose that may be why photographs of them are so popular, but I would guess that APOD pics of them are way more than 2% of the total historically..

That’s a strange criterion for selecting APOD photos. Total solar eclipses are seen by far fewer people than partial solar eclipses. Should APOD proportion them accordingly? And lunar eclipses are seen by even more people still! They would certainly crowd out many other pictures, such as JWST interpretations, which literally nobody has seen or can see.

Jim Armstrong wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 4:21 pm Seems out-of-balance, especially since I would call them terrestrial phenomena, not astronomical.

I have seen a rebuttal to the point of view that Galileo dethroned the Earth: that one can instead say he elevated Earth to the heavens.