Picture of Light1994

Himself - Representative from space:
So what is this aurora that we talked about? Let me show you what an aurora looks like when viewed from space. And what you're looking at is, first of all, the moonlit clouds below us and a bright streak of light in the sky which is just one filament of this great circle that surrounds the south geomagnetic pole and then there's the mirror image of that in the Northern Hemisphere. And you're looking at the stream of particles that's streaming in from the magnetosphere that's actually exciting the atoms in the atmosphere to glow. When you look down at that aurora you really see an impressive scene. You're looking at the electrical current surging through that aurora that on average is about the same energy as the entire network of high-tension power lines in North America, Bonneville Dam and Hoover Dam and all the rest of the power lines put together. The bottom of that curtain is about 70 miles in the air and we're about 190 miles up so we're looking down on the top of it that's sweeping past the aurora at 17,500 miles an hour... and as the magnetic tail, the magnetsophere shimmers and shakes and jiggles it changes the pattern of that aurora.