Milky Way Auroral Flower

It is possible that the stem of our Milky Way could bloom into a flower. It may appear that way in the featured all-sky image. The central plane of our home galaxy can be seen on the left. The sky's center is dominated by bright green-glowing oxygen on the right side of the picture. The two are not connected due to the fact that the red parts of the Aurora are in Earth's atmosphere. 10 trillion times further away, we can see the stars and nebulas of the Milky Way. The picture was taken across a small lake in northern Sweden. As our Sun's magnetic field develops into an active part of its 11-year cycle, it's likely that we'll see more Auroras near both of Earth's poles.

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Explanation: Do we dare believe our eyes? When we look at images of space, we often wonder whether they are "real", and just as often the best answer varies. In this case, the scene appears much as our eyes would see it, because it was obtained using RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters like the cone cells in our eyes, except collecting light for 19 hours, not a fraction of a second. The featured image was captured over six nights, using a 24-inch diameter telescope in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California, USA. The bright spiral galaxy at the center (NGC 7497) looks like it is being grasped by an eerie tendril of a space ghost, and therein lies the trick. The galaxy is actually 59 million light years away, while the nebulosity is MBM 54, less than one thousand light years away, making it one of the nearest cool clouds of gas and dust -- galactic cirrus -- within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Both are in the constellation of Pegasus, which can be seen high overhead from northern latitudes in the autumn.