Green skies and the milky Way

Last weekend Matt Comerford from Wyoming went to the nature to photograph the Perseid meteor shower. During the observations the sky over the Park Medicine Bow National Forest in southern Wyoming was suddenly illuminated with a green glow.

According to Comerford, exposure was 30 seconds, the picture were taken with a Nikon D850. In the photo you can see Mars, the milky Way and a meteor.

Though the glow looks like the Northern lights, it is not. Auroras are caused by solar wind. Airglow is due to chemiluminescence in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. These chemical reactions begin in the daytime when the atmosphere is literally "bathed" in the strong ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. At night we see podtsvechennye, painted in green with oxygen atoms at a height of 90-100 km.

Green glow it is best to photograph in very dark places at night during the new moon — as it was during the peak of the meteor shower the Perseids this year. Green stripes often appear on photographs of the milky Way taken with a long exposure.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»