#aurora

#aurora

Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021 competition have just been announced. The annual astronomy photography competition, now in its 13th year, is hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich and drew more than 4,500 entries, including many featuring images of distant galaxies that require the use of powerful telescopes.The overall winner of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021 was Shuchang Dong who took this deceptively simple photo of a solar eclipse titled "The Golden Ring" shown above. Dong took the photo in the Ali region of Tibet on June 21, 2020."This place has year-round sunny weather, but in front of the annular eclipse, I saw dark clouds all over the sky," Dong said, "We were waiting with anxious minds but we were lucky. Within a minute of the annular eclipse, the sunshine penetrated through the clouds and afterwards the Sun was sucked into the thick clouds.""This image demonstrates both the beauty and simplicity of an eclipse, but also the science behind this astronomical event," noted competition judge Emily Drabek-Maunder, "Our sun can still be seen as a ring circling the Moon as it passes in front of the Sun, and mountains on the lunar surface can be seen hiding some of this light on the lower righthand portion of the image. This is a stunning achievement!"View more of the fantastic photos of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition below.#astronomy #photography #AstronomyPhotographeroftheYear #ShuchangDong #sun #solareclipse

New Images of Discrete Aurora on MarsOn Earth, auroras are a phenomenon of lights in the skies that occur when solar winds hit the planet's magnetic field.Mars, on the other hand, has no global magnetic fields so scientists were surprised in 2016 when NASA's MAVEN spacecraft discovered that Mars, too, has auroras. Unlike terrestrial auroras, Martian ones are proton auroras and emit ultraviolet light.Today, Mars Hope Probe's EMUS (Emirate Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer) captured new images of another, weird type of auroras on the red planet's atmosphere called discrete auroras.From The Next Web:The pictures fully characterize the discrete aurora phenomenon in Mars’ atmosphere for the first time in history. Scientists believe they could challenge the notion that large scale solar events are needed to drive Mars auroral events.“The implications for our understanding of Mars’ atmospheric and magnetospheric science are tremendous and provide new support to the theory that solar storms are not necessary to drive Mars‘ aurora,” said Hessa Al Matroushi, the Emirates Mars Mission’s science lead.#Mars #aurora #EMUS #Emirates