Astronaut takes pictures of strange rainbow clouds at the edge of space

Astronaut Matthew Dominick was flying about 17,500 miles per hour above Earth when he looked out the window and saw this remarkable sight.

Dominick, who launched to the International Space Station in March as commander NASA‘with SpaceX Crew-8 mission, took out the camera and took the photo above. The picture taken on the 4th of July is as breathtaking as any fireworks display at our house.

Under a thin ripple Moon is a sublime bed of so-called noctilucent clouds, floating calmly before the stormy sunrise. These strange high-flying clouds on the edge space — charming scientists just two decades ago — are easily observable from the station’s orbit about 250 miles above Earth.

“We’ve had so many great sunrises lately with amazing night-glow clouds,” Dominick said on X, formerly Twitter. “Probably about 1,000 pictures were taken in the last week.

The tweet may have been deleted

At least as far back as the 19th century, astronomers have been looking at the sky and wondering about this type of cloud, the highest in the Earth’s atmosphere. Rain clouds tend to form no more than 10 miles away, but nocturnal luminous clouds float about 50 miles above the planet’s surface in a layer of the atmosphere known as the mesosphere.

From the ground, people often referred to them as “night-glow clouds” because their altitude allows them to reflect sunlight even after sunset. In summer, these iridescent clouds shimmer at dusk and dawn near the North and South Poles.

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How they were created remained a mystery until NASA Aeronomy of ice in the mesosphere (AIM) mission in 2007. Scientists knew that nocturnal glow clouds could change with latitude and solar activity, but they didn’t understand why.

With the spacecraft orbiting 350 miles above Earth, scientists discovered that clouds form when ice crystals condense on meteor smoke, tiny particles from falling stars which burn up in the atmosphere. Perhaps even more surprising was that the ice in the mesosphere forms in a single, continuous layer.

In its first year, the mission documented the “life cycle” of nocturnal luminous clouds in the Northern Hemisphere, beginning in late May and continuing through August. The satellite, which was only planned for a two-year study, previously returned 16 years of data his battery died last year.

His observations led to many discoveries, including how events closer to the ground could trigger changes in clouds and how an ice sheet in the upper atmosphere could cause eerie radar echoes in the atmosphere during the summer. Scientists applaud the spacecraft’s success, especially given the hurdles it overcame early in its mission: A malfunctioning receiver forced the NASA team to figure out how to reprogram it to communicate in Morse code.

One of the more recent findings from the mission is how humans influence cloud formation. AND study 2022 published in the journal Earth and Space Science found that morning rocket launches may actually have produced nocturnal luminous clouds at greater distances from the poles, over southern Alaska, central Canada, northern Europe, southern Scandinavia, and south central Russia.

The researchers compared the probe’s observations with the timing of launches south of 60 degrees north latitude. They found that there was a strong correlation between morning starts and nighttime luminous clouds at relatively lower latitudes.

Despite the end of the AIM mission, said Cora Randall, Deputy Chief Investigator in the statement that scientists will continue to make new discoveries based on the data.

“There are still gigabytes upon gigabytes of AIM data to study,” she said.