In today's image, we see an image of the aurora or norther lights as seen from an airplane. The red and green colors are both caused by the excitation of oxygen atoms in Earth's upper atmosphere with the red color from the higher layers and the green from lower layers. Both are from the upper atmosphere, well above Earth's surface.

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This Podcast is an authorized New Media Mirror Site for APOD. You can access the image and website directly at: Astronomy Picture of the Day. You can use the archive link below the image to select the photo corresponding to the date of this podcast.

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