Bright NLC in moonlight

Looked out the living room window and saw bright noctilucent clouds low in the sky. Packed up cameras etc and jumped in the car and drove off. Chose a place with a low horizon in the north and easy to bring the equipment from the car. When I have just started preparing for the photo I hear steps in the dark and turn on the headlamp and also see a pair of eyes in the dark. After a while I see that it is a deer buck coming straight towards me. He comes very close and looks at me before he heads off, a powerful meeting in the dark.

In the sky the noctilucent clouds are low in the north but they are very bright and beautiful. The moon is up and creates nice moonlight over the landscape. Choose to do some timelapses and macro/widefield pictures, a nice night and the darkness is on its way back.

 

Bright NLC´s

 

Noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, forming in the mesosphere about 76 to 85 kilometers (50 miles) above the surface.

Meaning "night-shining" in Latin, they appear as electric-blue, silvery, or glowing wisps during summer deep twilight when they are illuminated by the sun from below the horizon.

Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), also called polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) when viewed from space, are a tenuous atmospheric phenomenon. Unlike typical weather clouds that form less than 12 miles above Earth, NLCs occur at the very edge of space.How

For noctilucent clouds to form, three precise ingredients are required:

Extremely Low Temperatures: Temperatures in the mesosphere must drop below -120°C to -140°C.Water

Trace amounts of water vapor must be present.

Tiny dust particles are needed, primarily from micrometeors burning up in the atmosphere.

Water vapor freezes onto the meteoric dust to form microscopic ice crystals, which reflect sunlight. Their striking blue color is a result of the ice crystals scattering sunlight in the upper atmosphere.

Noctilucent clouds are a seasonal and latitudinal phenomenon. They occur only during the summer months when the upper atmosphere above the polar regions experiences its coldest temperatures.

Northern Hemisphere: Best viewed between mid-May and mid-August, primarily at mid-to-high latitudes (roughly 45° to 80° North, including northern Europe, Canada, and the northern United States).

Southern Hemisphere: Best viewed between mid-November and mid-February

Photos taken in Vallentuna Sweden 16-17/7 2026.

Aurora Corona

When the northern lights are really strong, you might be lucky enough to see them at their zenith, overhead like a corona. The picture shows the beginning of a corona last week.

An aurora corona is a spectacular form of aurora that occurs when you are directly under the magnetic field lines.

It looks as if all the light rays are radiating from a single point high in the sky (the zenith).

Why? It's a perspective effect, just like when parallel train tracks appear to meet on the horizon. In reality, the aurora rays are parallel and follow the Earth's magnetic field, but from the ground they appear to form a "crown" (corona in Latin).

Good seeing watching the moon

Very good view through the telescope when I looked at the moon the other week. At the top is Montes Jura, it surrounds the smooth lava bed Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows) on the northwestern edge of Mare Imbrium (Sea of ​​Rain). A little to the south is the mountain range Montes Recti where the highest peaks reach a height of about 1.8 km (Latin for "Straight Mountains") is a distinctive, linear mountain range on the moon, located in the northern part of Mare Imbrium. Below are the mountains Montes Teneriffa (Tenerife Mountains) with individual peaks at heights of up to 2.4 kilometers. The crater Plato (in Swedish often called Platon) is one of the moon's most famous and easily recognizable impact craters. It is particularly famous for its dark, flat bottom and its location at the edge of one of the large lunar oceans. Plato has one of the darkest surfaces on the moon because it is filled with old, solidified basaltic lava. Astronomers like Johannes Hevelius once called it "The Great Black Lake"

 

Heavy airglow

Amazing airglow by the coast last week. I could see it but not as much as in the photos.

Read about it here: Airglow - Wikipedia

And also some faint Aurora Borealis in the north, could see green band, actually two band and some pillars moving. In the middle of the panorama photo you have the Milky Way in Auriga/Perseus.

 

Orion rising

Bright planet Jupiter with the stars Castor and Pollux above (left), constellation Auriga and Taurus (middle) with the open cluster M45 Plejades (right), and constellation Orion rising from the ocean. Additionally, there is also heavy airglow visible to the naked eye. Airglow is a faint emission of light by a planetary atmosphere. In the case of Earth's atmosphere, this optical phenomenon causes the night sky never to be completely dark, even after the effects of starlight and diffused sunlight from the far side are removed. This phenomenon originates with self-illuminated gases and has no relationship with Earth's magnetism or sunspot activity, causing aurorae.

On planet Earth  

Feldspar, sometimes spelled felspar, is a group of rock-forming aluminium tectosilicate minerals, also containing other cations such as sodium, calcium, potassium, or barium. The most common members of the feldspar group are the plagioclase (sodium-calcium) feldspars and the alkali (potassium-sodium) feldspars. Feldspars make up about 60% of the Earth's crust and 41% of the Earth's continental crust by weight.

Feldspars crystallize from magma as both intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks and are also present in many types of metamorphic rock. Rock formed almost entirely of calcic plagioclase feldspar is known as anorthosite. Feldspars are also found in many kinds of sedimentary rocks.