It's been a while since I've written one of these blurbs, but hopefully this won't be too stilted! At Interlochen last summer, I experienced my first auroral display along the shore of Lake Michigan. Ok. So it was just kind of a fuzzy, shifting grayish green patch in the sky, not really as spectacular as some displays reputedly are, but, well, it was therenonetheless. Auroral displays are a phenomenon of the earth's magnetosphere (well, the sun's interaction with the Earth's magnetosphere, that is...) just as Jupiter's decametric emissions are a phenomenon of Jupiter's magnetosphere. (Confused? See my Jupiter-Io page. So naturally, my interest was piqued ;-) I can't claim to knowing more than the basic explanations of aurorae, so I'll turn you over to these folks, who without a doubt are more versed in geophysics than myself:
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