Colorful Aurora over Iceland

Explanation: You don't always see a scene this beautiful when you hike
to an ancient volcano -- you have to be lucky. When the astrophotographer
realized that aurora were visible two-weeks ago, he made a night-time run
for the top of the caldera to see if he could capture them also reflected
in the central lake. When he arrived, he found that ... the northern lights
were even brighter and more impressive than before! And his image of them
is the featured 13-frame panoramic mosaic. The crater lake in the center is
called Kerid (Icelandic: Kerið) and is about 3,000 years old. The aurora
overhead shows impressive colors and banding, with the red colors occurring
higher in the Earth's atmosphere than the green. The background sky is filled
with icons of the northern night including Polaris, the Pleiades star cluster,
and the stars that compose the handle of the Big Dipper.