Jaw-dropping northern lights

This amazing shot was taken in Norway by Ole Christian Salomonsen. It's one of the many photos featured in National Geographic's upcoming photo book, Visions of Earth. You can check out a video preview of some of the other photos on YouTube.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: Art and Design • Book • physics • Science • Space

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

iamlegion

Bowie in the sky, with hairspray.
BrotherPower

Let’s not fight, people. Not when we live in a world with beauty like that. ‘kay?
jmartcougar

northern lights are creepy
scionofgrace

Stunning.
Rich Keller

Yeah. Wow! I haven’t seen many auruora in person because they get obscured by the Chicago borealis.

Now, what’s the scientific explanation as to why we like this kind of thing? We can’t eat it and we can’t breed with it, (except maybe Lavinny Whately). But it’s beautiful to us and I wonder why sometimes.
irksome

To this day, the most beautiful thing I ever witnessed was the display in Reyjavik (despite ambient light), October of 1984; it covered 270 degrees of the sky, incorporated the full spectrum of color and it made a noise. I was freezing but I couldn’t pull myself away.

In my life I’ve also witnessed birth, death, Scott Russell winning the Daytona 200 despite crashing his bike on the first lap and Rostropovich’s first concert at Carnegie Hall following his departure from the USSR; nothing compares to that night.
Susan Carley Oliver

Are those meteorites as well, streaking through?

(@irksome – it covered 270 degrees of the sky? Not sure how this is possible; regardless, it sounds stunning, and how wonderful that you have this moment in your life!)
MelSkunk

How sad is it that I saw this exact image first photoshopped to look like a My Little Pony (the pony in question has an aurora-like mane, so it wasn’t a total non-sequitor)
http://twitter.com/Deprogrammer9 Depro9

Nikola Tesla wanted to create artificial northern lights around the planet to light cities at night. He would achieve this the same way the sun creates the ones you see in this pic via high frequency energy blasted into the atmosphere. Cool guy that Tesla. ;)