The skies of the past months have given us many surprises. Here are my 4 favorite images of summer 2024.
2024, July 9: Noctilucent Clouds over Florida
These clouds are doubly unusual. First, they are rare noctilucent clouds, meaning that they are visible at night, but only just before sunrise or just after sunset. Second, the source of these noctilucent clouds is actually known. In this rare case, the source of the sunlight, reflecting ice, crystals in the upper atmosphere can be traced back to the launch of a nearby SpaceX rocket about 30 minutes earlier. Known more formally as polar mesospheric clouds, the vertex of these icy wisps happens to converge just in front of a rising crescent Moon. The bright spot to the right of the Moon is the planet Jupiter, while the dotted lights above the horizon on the right are from an airplane.
2024, July 29: Milky Way over Uluru
One of my favorite place in the world, so misterious, so exciting, so peaceful. Uluru is the extraordinary 350-meter high mountain in central Australia. Uluru rises sharply from nearly flat surroundings. Composed of sandstone, this mountain has slowly formed over the past 300 million years as softer rock eroded away. The Uluru region has been a home to humans for over 22,000 years. This spectacular starry sky above Uluru includes the central band of our Milky Way galaxy, complete with complex dark filaments of dust, bright red emission nebulas, and billions of stars,
2024, August 14: Meteors and Aurora over Germany
This was an unusual night. The Perseids occur predictably every August, but auroras visible this far south are more unusual and less predictable. Therefore, meteors streaked across the dark night as small bits cast off from Comet Swift-Tuttle came crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere. Even more unusually, for central Germany at least, the night sky glowed purple. The red-blue hue was due to aurora caused by an explosion of particles from the Sun a few days before. This auroral storm was so intense that it was seen as far south as Texas and Italy, in Earth’s northern hemisphere. The featured image composite was built from 7 exposures taken over 26 minutes from Ense, Germany.
2024, August 27: Moon Eclipses Saturn
Sometimes Saturn disappeares. It doesn’t really go away, though, it just disappears from view when our Moon moves in front. Such a Saturnian eclipse, better called an occultation, was visible along a long swath of Earth, from Peru, across the Atlantic Ocean, to Italy, in the last August. The featured color image is a digital fusion of the clearest images captured during the event and rebalanced for color and relative brightness between the relatively dim Saturn and the comparatively bright Moon. Eclipses of Saturn by our Moon will occur each month for the rest of this year. Each time, though, the fleeting event will be visible only to those with clear skies, obviously to the right location on Earth.
References: APOD
