Atacama airglow

This fish-eye image taken by ESO Photo Ambassador, Babak Tafreshi, shows the Milky Way overhead the Atacama Desert in Chile. Prominent at low horizons is airglow caused by the weak emission of light in Earth's atmosphere. Although the effect is fairly uniform across the atmosphere, to an observer on the ground the phenomenon appears brightest about 10 degrees above the horizon, because the lower one looks, the greater the depth of atmosphere one is looking through.

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• Equirectangular projected version of this image
• Extended to 360 x 180 degrees (with black) panorama version of this image