Starship Asterisk*

Time Lapse Auroras Over Norway

Explanation: Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month when one of the largest auroral displays in recent years appeared over northern locations like the border between Norway and Russia. Pictured in the above time-lapse movie, auroras flow over snow covered landscapes, trees, clouds, mountains and lakes found near Kirkenes, Norway. Many times the auroras are green, as high energy particles strike the Earth's atmosphere, causing the air to glow as electrons recombine with their oxygen hosts. Other colors are occasionally noticeable as atmospheric nitrogen also becomes affected. In later sequences the Moon and rising stars are also visible. With the Sun expected to become ever more active over the next few years, there may be many opportunities to see similarly spectacular auroras personally, even from areas much closer to the equator.

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Once again APOD have published a 'picture' which crashes my browser - once again I've had to modify my prefs.js manually to remove APOD as my home page.

That's an astounding movie. Great job!

Uber-cool movie! And to use music from the awesome Gladiator soundtrack - double thumbs up!
This is already one of my favorites! (But then, I always like the aurora images and videos!)



And 'Guest', let me just say: my heart bleeds for you.... and your browser.

Fantastic! I give today's APOD a 10!

Guest wrote:Once again APOD have published a 'picture' which crashes my browser - once again I've had to modify my prefs.js manually to remove APOD as my home page.

Without more information, it's impossible to debug this. It could be that you need to update your browser. I'm looking at the page with Firefox right now and am not getting any errors. Today's APOD is just an iframe with the vimeo page inside it.

I think this time-lapse movie from Tromsø, Norway is even more spectacular:

http://vimeo.com/21419634

I can't stop watching it.

domsel wrote:I think this time-lapse movie from Tromsø, Norway is even more spectacular:

http://vimeo.com/21419634

I can't stop watching it.

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=23233

Has anyone analyzed the time frame from 1:35:00 on this video? Watch the blue spot in the center of the screen.

SPECTACULAR movie!

Could a related .jpg be embedded in the description instead so that APOD desktop users don't see a cat? (http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Cats/Curious.jpg)

Dear APOD for about three years I've been using you as my wall paper, with great delight, but over the last couple of months I have received several images that were not related to Astronomy, I fear that some day I will come to work and have a very wrong photo on my desktop, due to this risk I can no longer use your website for this purpose, sorry, hope that you are able to be more secure in the future. Note I have also in the past directed friends, co-workers, students and family to your website, I will no longer be able to do this with confidence that your site will not publish some random pornographic image.

Spectacular and beautiful timelapse.
Greetings
César

electronfairy wrote:Could a related .jpg be embedded in the description instead so that APOD desktop users don't see a cat?

dadoss314 wrote:Dear APOD for about three years I've been using you as my wall paper, with great delight, but over the last couple of months I have received several images that were not related to Astronomy, I fear that some day I will come to work and have a very wrong photo on my desktop, due to this risk I can no longer use your website for this purpose, sorry, hope that you are able to be more secure in the future. Note I have also in the past directed friends, co-workers, students and family to your website, I will no longer be able to do this with confidence that your site will not publish some random pornographic image.

While I agree that electronfairy's request is perfectly reasonable, and shouldn't be that difficult to grant, dadoss314's fears are completely unfounded. If you checked, I think you would find that all the unrelated images you have seen have come from links within the APOD text. I find it highly unlikely the editor's will be including any random pornographic images. Don't blame APOD for the failure of whatever widget you use to post APOD images on your desktop as a background.

Beautiful video and we didn't even have to go to Norway to enjoy.

To the person that replied to my post thank you, I was at a friends cube several years ago and noticed the very beautiful images that they always had as background and asked about it, they told me to go to APOD website and download the application, this is why my thought is, that this is the source of the images and I do not think that the "Editors" would intentionally place in appropriate material there, that there is an area that is unsecured that the images are stored in, I just ask that some investigation be conducted to determine what and why this has occurred over just the last few months, thanks. I have note received anything horrible just that in this day and age, and innocent error can get blown up if good people are not made aware of a problem. Have a great day and starry Night.

dadoss314 wrote:To the person that replied to my post thank you, I was at a friends cube several years ago and noticed the very beautiful images that they always had as background and asked about it, they told me to go to APOD website and download the application, this is why my thought is, that this is the source of the images and I do not think that the "Editors" would intentionally place in appropriate material there, that there is an area that is unsecured that the images are stored in, I just ask that some investigation be conducted to determine what and why this has occurred over just the last few months, thanks. I have note received anything horrible just that in this day and age, and innocent error can get blown up if good people are not made aware of a problem. Have a great day and starry Night.

The application is 3rd party software and is not the property of APOD. The images you have been seeing are from links within the APOD text. APOD has not been hacked. See: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=23005 , http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=23245 , and the link from today's APOD, opportunities to see.

That was awesome. Thank you so much.

Aurora means dawn, not Northern Lights. Other than that little blip, the videos were stunning and wonderful

carlynslo wrote:Aurora means dawn, not Northern Lights.

Aurora does indeed mean dawn, after the Roman goddess of the dawn, but like most words, it has another meaning: "a luminous phenomenon that consists of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper atmosphere of a planet's magnetic polar regions and is caused by the emission of light from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet's magnetic field lines." Specifically, aurora borealis is the northern lights and aurora australis is the southern lights.

I'm sure it's a beautiful video. Initially, I cannot see it. Why? Because it is hosted off another site, which I have not chosen to trust.
A reasonable way to run a Windows system is to set Internet Explorer to distrust every site in the "Internet Zone", so as not to allow any active content from such a site to run. This is how I manage my system. I do occasionally add sites to my "Trusted Sites" list that 1) don't deliver ad content and 2) are folks I choose to trust. Nasa.gov is one such domain, and is in my Trusted Sites list.

May I request that if you're sure the content of a video (or other active format) is safe for consumption by others, that you copy it to your own web site. You will, of course, need to be sure your servers can handle the high load. This should be no problem for NASA.

I have a workaround, which is to run Safari and accept a bit more risk for this particular page.

-Noel

The video does not work. Next time, try posting the mp4 link so people can actually watch it.

Am I the only one who's getting the Cassini fly-by time-lapse movie on today's page instead of the Norway aurora?? The text description below it describes the Norway clips but the movie itself is the Cassini-Saturn fly-by that was posted a few weeks back.

You can see the video on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/21294655
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=23216

I saw all the links fine, The cat in the fishbowl represents opportunities to see; a little bit of humor. The vimeo came in fine. I think a lot depends on witch sites a person's security trusts.

Thanks bystander, I was able to find and see the amazingly beautiful video. It's just that that's not what shows up on the APOD page, yet no one else seems to be having this problem. Weird!

Edited: Figured it out! "Old tab fatigue." Opening a fresh tab did the trick. Thx bystander!