APOD: Aurora and Milky Way over Norway (2023 Dec 12)

[APOD Robot]

Aurora and Milky Way over Norway

Explanation: What are these two giant arches across the sky? Perhaps the more familiar one, on the left, is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. This grand disk of stars and nebulas here appears to encircle much of the southern sky. Visible below the stellar arch is the rusty-orange planet Mars and the extended Andromeda galaxy. But this night had more! For a few minutes during this cold arctic night, a second giant arch appeared encircling part of the northern sky: an aurora. Auroras are much closer than stars as they are composed of glowing air high in Earth's atmosphere. Visible outside the green auroral arch is the group of stars popularly known as the Big Dipper. The featured digital composite of 20 images was captured in mid-November 2022 over the Lofoten Islands in Norway.

<< Previous APOD

This Day in APOD

Next APOD >>

[VictorBorun]

it would take a logarithmic scale to map the distances of every labelled thing in this APOD.
The same goes for their lifetimes; those are like this:

Aurora < Norwegian Sea < Big Dipper Stars < Mars, Pleiades, Milky Way, Andromeda
100 microyears < 10 megayears < 1 gigayear < 10 gigayears

[johnnydeep]

Although I tire of these "prosaic" APODs, I'll ask a question anyway: the Instagram link says this is a 360° panorama, which explains the arc shape of the Milky Way (which naturally follows a great circle on the celestial sphere), the aurora is also seen as an arc here, but is also described as looking like an arc by direct eye view. So I suppose this panorama simply makes the aurora look more like an arc than normal?

[Chris Peterson]

Although I tire of these "prosaic" APODs...

Me too! I've always appreciated the occasional landscape/skyscape. But lately, that's practically all we're getting. All of the amazing amateur images being submitted, all of the remarkable images coming back from our latest professional equipment... and we get the Milky Way and auroras. Pretty, but not very interesting, and not educational. What's going on?

I'm increasingly spending my time here on the submissions pages. That's where the real astronomical images are to be found.