Here are magnificent northern lights photographed from space on September 15, 2017 by Paolo Nespoli. The ESA astronaut arrived aboard the International Space Station at the end of July 2017. For four months, he carried out a mission called Vita.

Aurora (northern lights)

An aurora sometimes referred to as a polar lights or northern lights, is a natural light display in the Earth's sky, predominantly seen in the high latitude (Arctic and Antarctic) regions.

Auroras are produced when the magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by the solar wind that the trajectories of charged particles in both solar wind and magnetospheric plasma, mainly in the form of electrons and protons, precipitate them into the upper atmosphere (thermosphere/exosphere) due to Earth's magnetic field, where their energy is lost.
From the windows of his orbital apartment where he moved in late July 2017, the Italian Paolo Nespoli had the opportunity to admire several times auroras that set the atmosphere above the polar regions of the earth. The images that you see above, in accelerated, were taken by the astronaut of the ESA on September 15, 2017. "Una splendida aurora ... Di una bellezza spaziale! "He had tweeted (Hive account@astro_paolo), which means" a splendid dawn ... Its beauty is out of this world! ". A few days earlier, 150 million kilometers from Earth, the Sun was the scene of the most powerful eruptions in the last twelve years.

Vita Mission

The 60-year-old Paolo Nespoli, who is the third time in his career in space, leads a mission called Vita (Vitality, Innovation, Technology and Ability), "Life" in Italian on board International Space Station (ISS). It lasts four months and consists of numerous experiments in biology, human physiology in the inhospitable environment of space, and also in technological demonstrations.

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