A Spiral Aurora over Iceland
What's happened to the sky? Aurora ! Captured late last month, this aurora was noted by Iceland ers for its great brightness and quick development. The aurora resulted from a solar storm, with high energy particles bursting out from the Sun and through a crack in Earth's protective magnetosphere a few days later. Although a spiral pattern can be discerned, creative humans might imagine the complex glow as an atmospheric apparition of any number of common icons . In the foreground of the featured image is the lfus River , while the lights illuminate a bridge in Selfoss City . Just beyond the low clouds is a nearly full Moon. The liveliness of the Sun -- and the resulting auroras on Earth -- is slowly diminishing as the Sun emerges from a Solar maximum of surface activity and evolves towards a historically more quite period in its 11-year cycle. In fact, solar astronomers are waiting to see if the coming Solar minimum will be as unusually quiet as the last one , where sometimes months would go by with no discernible sunspots or other active solar phenomena. Follow APOD on: Facebook , Google Plus , or Twitter