Night shining clouds no longer just near poles
This image shows one of the first ground sightings of noctilucent clouds in the 2007 season. Photo & excerpt:
Veres Viktor
of Budapest, Hungary taken on June 15, 2007.
See a larger version of this image.
Today, another indication of a changing planet Earth.
Night shining clouds, also known as noctilucent clouds, are being seen more frequently and at lower latitudes than ever before. They’ve also been seen to be growing brighter.
James Russell: They are called night shining clouds because they’re so high up, 50 miles above the surface, that the sun will still reflect off of them even though an observer on the ground will be in darkness.
That was James Russell of Hampton University. He leads the AIM satellite mission to study night shining clouds. He told Earth & Sky that these clouds form high in the atmosphere, at the edge of space, where the air is extremely cold and 100 thousand times drier than the Sahara Desert.
Over the past several decades, night shining clouds have been getting brighter and are now appearing more frequently at lower latitudes, even visible from Oregon, Colorado or Utah.
James Russell: What this is saying is that the atmosphere, in a very distant remote part of the atmosphere, is changing because of things that we’re doing on the Earth’s surface, and if that’s true, that says the whole atmosphere is changing and we need to be concerned about that and understand the implications of it.
Our thanks to NASA: explore, discover, understand.
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It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it?
did anyone see a LARGE meteor/shooting star Thursday night around 11 pm on the Southern Horizion? Were there any that could be viewed? It was a brillant gold/orange color and went first due east but also seemed to also spread to the west before disappearing. My husband & I were at our NC beach observing the incredibly clear Milky Way and other sky treasures, when “it” streaked to the left of the Milky Way…. We were amazed!!!!