Auroras Just Formed a Perfect Heart Over Norway and One Photographer Caught it on Camera
Just ahead of Valentine’s Day, the sky seems to be falling in love. And it is not shying away from expressing it either. The Sun, which is unusually active these days due to the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, launched a squall of intensely charged particles towards the Earth, which inspired an enchanting heart-shaped aurora in Norwegian skies. A giant heart glowing purple and green materialized in the sky, as if mimicking the sentiments of couples during this week of romance. Photographer Kristoffer Vangen (@krisvang) got to be the lucky one to capture the rare sighting. “Perhaps a heart is a bit cliché, but I’m not complaining,” he wrote.
The photograph arrests a striking moment from the historic fishing village of Hamn i Senja, famous for its turquoise fjords, islets, and clusters of snow-dipped mountains. The landscape in the picture is flanked by rising and falling hills, half frosted in pearl-colored snow, and peppered with dark orange hut-roofed houses, clumps of vegetation, and trees. Outlined with a minty green shimmer, the heart is glowing with hues of purple. With this purple-green heart highlighted in the center, the surrounding aurora is a curtain of glassy blues, purples, greens, and maroons, punctuated here and there with faintly shining stars. Vangen said he took the shot on January 16, a week before the post. For most viewers, it was “love at first sight.” Many are screenshotting it for their wallpapers.
In the caption, Vangen exclaimed that he had wanted to capture a shot like this for a long time. He often visualized an aurora with a shape like a bird, a tornado, or a skull, so when the opportunity presented, he couldn’t be more excited. With his Nikon camera, he captured the delicious light show using the “astro-modified sensor, which detects a lot of red color.” He added that he spent a good amount of time editing the foreground, especially the houses, to get a better quality and enhance the composition. The foreground picture was taken 30 minutes later and about 50 feet away and was blended with the Northern Lights picture.
Auroras are triggered when the Sun’s magnetic field becomes too chaotic and starts ejecting streams of energetic particles towards the Earth, further accelerated by Alfvén waves, per Nature Communications. It’s as if electrons are tiny energy-packed boats riding on the waves of supercharged electricity. When they finally crash into our planet, the magnetic boundary lines shielding the planet prevent them from entering the atmosphere. But along the North and South Poles, the magnetic lines create a funnel-like structure that these particles are able to breach.
Upon successful entry into the atmosphere, they interact with molecules of gases and kick them with energy, which makes them excited. To relax the excitement, the molecules emit colorful lights. Depending on how the molecules dance in the sky, the lights whittle themselves into different shapes. Heart, in this case. “Killed this shot,” commented Adobe Lightroom (@lightroom) on Vangen’s photograph on Instagram.
Some viewers, however, were skeptical that the photograph is too unreal to be non-AI. In an Instagram story, Vangen clarified that “it’s not AI.” Others asked him to send the RAW file. He denied sharing the file but said he would share the behind-the-scenes process of how he filmed and edited the aurora. Many viewers jumped into the comments section to defend him. “I know it's not a fake picture, I saw it with my own eyes when I was on my way down from the Segla viewpoint that day,” wrote @chmueller80. In today’s world, he said, it is understandable if someone says an image like this is AI. But sometimes, it is just evidence of nature’s unbelievable, unfathomable magic.
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