A view of the aurora borealis from space, captured by the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite at 3:20 am CDT on 11 May 2024. NASA Earth Observatory:
The VIIRS day-night band detects nighttime light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, reflected moonlight, and auroras.
In this view, the northern lights appear as a bright white strip across parts of Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. But auroras are dynamic, and different coverage and patterns of light would have been visible at other times of the night. And while these satellite data are shown in grayscale, viewers on the ground saw colors from green (the most common) to purple to red. Atmospheric compounds found at different altitudes influence an aurora’s color.
It boggles the mind a bit that by imaging the aurorae from above, with city lights visible and states and lakes outlined, what we kind of have, above, is a map of the aurorae—at least at a single moment in time.
