Exclusive Video of Aurora Australis (Southern Lights)

We have already seen an amazing time-lapse video showing an orbit of the Earth from the International Space Station - as featured first on Mail Online. 

And now astronauts have released another amazing video of their window on the world. 

It shows the Southern Lights, known as the aurora australis, as the space station passed over Eastern Australia on September 11.

Scroll down to see the video 

Green haze: The space station glides towards the Southern Lights, the aurora australis, over Eastern Australia

Spectacular: The stunning sight is formed as charged particles streaming from the Sun - known as the solar wind - interact with Earth's magnetic field, resulting in collisions with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere

These ever-shifting displays are most visible near the North (aurora borealis) and South (aurora australis) Poles.

Around the world in 60 seconds: Incredible time-lapse video from the International Space Station

The stunning sight is formed as charged particles streaming from the Sun – known as the solar wind - interact with Earth’s magnetic field, resulting in collisions with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen (the elements which form the majority of the air we breathe) in the upper atmosphere.

This striking aurora image was taken during a geomagnetic storm that was probably caused by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun - a phenomenon where particles are ejected from the sun, often associated with sunspots.

When high-energy particles from the Sun strike oxygen atoms in our atmosphere, the atoms 'release' the energy in the form of light particles, or photons. These tend to be emitted at wavelengths centered at 0.558 micrometers, or millionths of a metre - which the human eye perceives as green. 

Light from the sun 'reflects' off plant leaves at the same wavelength, which is why plants look green to us. 

The most commonly observed colour of aurora is green, caused by photons (light) emitted by excited oxygen atoms at wavelengths centered at 0.558 micrometers, or millionths of a metre

Red aurora are generated by light emitted at a longer wavelength (0.630 micrometers), and other colours such as purple or brown are also sometimes observed - the colours depend on the energy of the geomagnetic storms, and how high in the atmosphere the impact with oxygen and nitrogen atoms occur. 

While aurora are generally only visible close to the poles, severe magnetic storms impacting the Earth’s magnetic field can shift them towards the equator.

The ISS is the 11th space station ever launched after previous space stations such as Salyut, Almaz, Cosmos, Skylab, and MIR. Its orbit is close enough to earth's surface that it is often visible to the naked eye. 

It serves as a research laboratory that has a microgravity environment in which crews conduct experiments in many fields including biology, human biology, physics, astronomy and meteorology. Experiments on the space station also aim to test the feasibility of further missions to the Moon - or even to Mars. 

The station is expected to remain in operation until at least 2020, and potentially to 2028, when some Russian modules will be separated to form the OPSEK space station.

And the European Space Agency estimate that the cost of the station will be $136billion (€100bn) over 30 years. The price of the space station dwarfs even the most expensive earthbound science projects - the Large Hadron Collider cost a mere £6.19bn ($9.72bn) as of June 2010. 

On November 2 last year the ISS marked its 10th anniversary of continuous human occupation, and it was launched almost 11 years ago, on October 31, 2000.

At the time of the anniversary, the station’s odometer read more than 1.5 billion statute miles (the equivalent of eight round trips to the Sun), over the course of 57,361 orbits around the Earth.

Source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk

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