A Whale of an Aurora over Swedish Forest

What is that in the sky? An animal. A cloud of fast- moving electrons, protons, and ion were thrown toward the Earth by a large mass ejection on the Sun earlier this month. Spectacular Auroras were seen at some high northern latitudes after part of the cloud impacted our Earth's magnetosphere. There is a beautiful view of the city ofstersund from a scenic perch above a forest in Sweden. Feel free to share what it looks like to you, even if it appears like a large whale to some. The Sun of the past few years has been very quiet. As our Sun gets closer to a solar maximum in its 11-year solar magnetic cycle, dramatic Auroras like this are sure to continue.

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Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired Hubble Space Telescope image data.