Aurora Cinnamon Roll

An intense auroral display dances in the shape of a cinnamon roll over Fort Yukon, Alaska. This image faces east with the Fort Yukon Long Range Radar Site in the foreground. After this auroral substorm, the LAMP (Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations) sounding rocket launched and successfully captured data of pulsating aurora. Auroras come in different shapes and colors, waving their ribbons of vibrant green, red and purple across the sky. Auroras ignite in our skies when energetic particles from space collide with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere. Intense greens as seen here indicate a collision between the charged particles and oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. This photo was captured by Vincent Ledvina, Space Physics Ph.D. student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks studying the aurora. Ledvina is a current ambassador and former intern for Aurorasaurus, a NASA citizen science project.