Credit: NASA · NASA material is generally not copyrighted; items carrying a third-party or copyright credit are excluded. The NASA logo and insignia are never reused.
NASA
APOD
Science
APOD
APOD: 2026 October 6 – A…
Today’s APOD
Archive
Submissions
Index
Search
Calendar
RSS
Education
About
Discuss
APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
ESA, CAS, SMILE, UVI
A Complete Auroral Oval from SMILE
Explanation: Have you ever seen a complete auroral oval? You can’t see one from the ground because it makes too large a circle around one of Earth’s magnetic poles. But spacecraft high above the Earth can see them. The featured video from ESA and CAS‘s robotic SMILE spacecraft shows not only a full auroral oval, but using ultraviolet light, one that occurred during the day. The time-lapse covers about an hour in late July and shows visually how variable and turbulent auroras really are. The points of light on the sides are distant stars that appear to move only because SMILE’s camera view shifts as the spacecraft orbits the Earth. A goal of SMILE is to better understand how the Sun’s wind interacts with the Earth’s magnetosphere — and so better understand how to protect astronauts, spacecraft, and ground-based electrical grids from solar storms.
Tomorrow’s picture: a ghost
Date:
October 6, 2026
Credit:
ESA, CAS, SMILE, UVI
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:
ASD at NASA / GSFC,NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.
Random APOD Generator
Yesterday’s Image
APOD: 2026 October 5 – M104: The Sombrero Galaxy’s Tidal Streams
Tomorrow’s Image
