The Most Awesomest Winter thing ever: Rocket, Laser and Northern lights(auroa borealis)!

OK, that’s awesome. All it needs is a rampaging T-Rex to be the greatest single picture ever taken.
So what you’re seeing here is a wide-angle lens time exposure of a rocket launch on February 18, 2012, from Fairbanks Alaska at the Poker Flat The Auroa obvious enough; they’re the green glow in the sky. The bright streak is the rocket going up, and the pink hook halfway up is the first stage dropping away — note how the streak dims from the ground up to that point, then brightens again when the second stage ignited.

The green streak on the left is a laser being shot into the sky. Lasers excite (give energy to) atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, and that can be used to measure what’s going on up there. The beam appears to curve because this is a wide angle lens which distorts the geometry of the image.

So why the launch? On board the rocket was the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling in the Alfvén resonator ...