A recent study by NASA in Norway resulted in some alien skies – and really cool photos.
Of course, not everyone was aware of what was going on so the sudden appearance of strange things up above had people speculating about what it could possibly be.
Image via NASA/Lee Wingfield.
And though it wasn’t an attack from aliens, it did end up being a pretty out-of-this-world light show.
The lights were part of the AZURE project to study the phenomenon of auroras, writes PetaPixel.
NASA launched a series of rockets from Andøya Space Center with vapors that formed artificial clouds of different colors some “71 and 150 miles above the Norwegian Sea” to monitor auroral winds.
“The AZURE mission is designed to make measurements of the atmospheric density and temperature with instruments on the rockets and deploying visible gas tracers, trimethyl aluminum (TMA) and a barium/strontium mixture, which ionizes when exposed to sunlight…These mixtures, using substances similar to those found in fireworks, created colorful clouds that allow researchers to track the flow of neutral and charged particles with the auroral wind,” NASA writes on their blog post.
German astrophotographer Michael Theusner was the one of the first to describe the light show as an alien attack, writing, “While we were watching the after-effects of a beautiful northern lights display, the rockets were launched from the Andøya Space Center only about 180 km away to the north…We saw two orange dots rise into the sky and disappear. A short while later strange lights and colorful, expanding clouds appeared I first did not have an explanation for. It looked like an alien attack.”
The light show presented a unique opportunity for “aurora photographer” Chad Blakley, who said to Forbes, “I first spotted the lights on our Aurora Web Cam which continually captures the night sky above Abisko in Sweden, and couldn’t believe what I was seeing…It was completely out of this world!”
You can watch a video of the light show here on YouTube.
Light Stalking http://bit.ly/2PzuB75
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