Clouds and aurora in a natural setting

Ray Stinson recently shared these beautiful images of aurora and clouds with me. They were taken in Glacier National Park in Montana, USA.

This image by Ray Stinson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This image by Ray Stinson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This image by Ray Stinson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This image by Ray Stinson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The orange glow at the horizon in some of the photos is skyglow from Browning, Montana, over 50 kilometers away.

A few years ago, Ray took some photos of dark clouds passing over the Milky Way for me to use in this article that looks at the effects of clouds on skyglow. For nearly all of Earth's history, clouds made the night darker, just like they do in the day. It's only recently that this has been reversed, and we have now observed overcast skies over 2,000 times brighter than the natural star filled sky. We don't yet have models that can tell us where clouds make the sky brighter, but we do know that the affected area is enormous.

Nocturnal animals specialized to live under nighttime light levels. Over much of the Earth's land surface, the night no longer occurs, there is only daytime and twilight. Unfortunately, there has been almost no research into whether and what this change has done to ecosystems.

Possible meteor shower on May 24

Mark your calendars: May 24 is probably the best night of the year to make Loss of the Night app and Globe at Night observations. The reason? Earth is going to pass through the debris ejected by comet 209P/LINEAR in the 1800s.

Since it's not known what the comet was doing in the 1800s, there's a lot of room for surprises. The peak is forecast between 2-4 o'clock in the morning Eastern Daylight Time (8-10 am Berlin time) on May 24th. Since there is considerable uncertainty on when exactly the peak will occur, depending on your location it may be worth going out on both May 23 (late evening), May 24 (early morning) or the early evening of May 24. Use this applet to figure out the most likely best times to observe at your location.

I have seen a number of meteors while using the app, and even once a fireball over Berlin! The next moon free phase runs from approximately May 19-28.