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Headline: Tournament Earth 2020: Best Picture Of NASA Earth Observatory Contest - Auroras Light Up the Antarctic Night

Caption: The “southern lights” were bright enough to illuminate the ice below. On July 15, 2012, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime view of the aurora australis, or “southern lights,” over Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land and the Princess Ragnhild Coast. The image was captured by the VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In the case of the image above, the sensor detected the visible auroral light emissions as energetic particles rained down from Earth’s magnetosphere and into the gases of the upper atmosphere. The slightly jagged appearance of the auroral lines is a function of the rapid dance of the energetic particles at the same time that the satellite is moving and the VIIRS sensor is scanning.

Keywords: ice,Infrared,Visible,illuminate,southern,Night,Antarctic,Light,Auroras,odd,oddity,offbeat,weird,amazing,interesting,cool,science,tech,technology

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