The Cosmonaut on board the International Space Station made an unusual image of the Earth from space. The photos show two bizarre blue spots of light in the planet's atmosphere. The blinding pair looks "a little more distant," writing Live Science. In fact, they are the result of two unrelated natural phenomena that just happened at the same time.
An unnamed crew member of the 66th expedition made an image of the ISS taking place over the South China Sea, a photograph published by the NASA Earth Observatory.
The first spot of light that can be seen at the bottom of the image is a massive lightning strike around the Gulf of Siamne. Lightning strikes are usually difficult to see with the ISS, usually hidden by clouds. But this particular event took place near a large round break in the upper part of the clouds. It caused lightning to lighten the surrounding walls of a cloud structure similar to the caldera, creating a glowing ring.
The second blue spot, which can be seen in the right upper corner of the image, was created by a distortion of the moon light. The orientation of the Earth ' s natural satellite to the ISS results in the light that it reflects from the Sun passing through the planet ' s atmosphere, turning it into a bright blue spot with a vague ore. According to the NASA Earth Observatory, this effect is due to the fact that part of the moon light is scattered on tiny particles in the Earth ' s atmosphere.
The different colors of the visible light differ in the length of the waves, which affects their interaction with atmospheric particles. In blue light, the shortest wave length and therefore it is more diffused, the moon has become blue in the image. The same effect explains why the sky seems blue in the daytime: according to NASA, the blue wave lengths of the sunlight scatter most and become more visible to the human eye.
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