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Northern lights as you have (probably) never seen them before

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Chances are, unless you've been lucky enough to see them in person, you will have seen the northern lights in a time lapse video online. But have you ever seen them just as they would play out in real life?

Kai-Marius Pedersen is a northern lights hunter who records videos of real time aurora. No distracting music, no montages containing weeks worth of images in a few minutes. This is his first real time aurora video from a few months ago:


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And his second is even more spectacular:

I have a lot of time for polished videos and grand effects, but sometimes it's nice to get as close to the real thing as possible.

Note: The featured image for this post is a view of the northern lights from the International Space Station. A real view that you've almost certainly never seen before...

(via @cosmos4u)

Kelly Oakes has a master's degree in science communication and a degree in physics, both from Imperial College London. She started this blog so she could share some amazing stories about space, astrophysics, particle physics and more with other people, and partly so she could explore those stories herself.

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