THE HUBBLE DEEP FIELD

The image below is a photo of the exhibit poster. A text transcript follows.

Photo of the poster from the exhibit.

Poster from Sky & Telescope, Sky Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1993. Printed in Canada.

And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame;
Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came,
It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge;
Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge,
Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled;
Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled,
There is our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes
Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battle field of the skies

Robert Service, from "The Ballad of the Northern Lights"

Image captions:

  • Looking like a luminous tornado, this auroral display features a greenish curled band.
  • A nearly edge-on view of a rayed band gives it the appearance of a lightning bolt or a magnificent geyser.
  • Blue and purple auroras are rare, occuring mostly during the twilight. Purple rays over Fairbanks, Alaska, highlight the constellation Perseus.
  • A wispy blue aurora in southern Finland.
  • A yellow curl accents this unusual three-color auroral display in the Alaskan sky. As this photograph shows, red auroras generally occur higher in the atmosphere than green auroras, which are the most common.
  • A rayed arc levitates in the morning twilight.
  • A pair of parallel arcs with fine perpendicular ray structure glows near the horizon. The lower arc is an example of an enhanced aurora, in which a bright band lies just above the arc's lower edge.
  • Astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery enjoyed this spectacular display of the aurora australis over the Antarctic in April of 1991.
  • The rays of a corona aurora stream out in all direction, as if in an explosion.
  • In this sequence of fisheye images, a small aurora blooms into a dazzling display of bands and arcs that spans the sky over Chatanika, Alaska. Successive frames are about a minute apart.
  • The northern lights shine with ghostly grandeur above a snowy ridge in Alaska. Multiple curved bands and thin rays of light are visible in this aurora. The bright "star" on the left edge is the planet Jupiter, and the Pleiades star cluster sparkles just above the mountaintop.
  • Ionized hydrogen atoms -- protons and electrons -- stream from the Sun into space as the solar wind. The solar wind blows against the magnetosphere, the giant magnetic field that surrounds the Earth. Some of the charged particles cut across the magnetic lines of force, creating a natural electric generator. Current from this generator flows down magnetic field lines into the high atmosphere around the north and south poles. The current excites atmospheric gases -- mainly oxygen and nitrogen -- to glow like the gas in a fluorescent lamp. This is the light of the aurora.

Image credits: Forrest Baldwin, Robert H. Eather, Jack Finch, Pekka Parviainen, Steven Simpson