 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for March 4th of 2024 is titled Light Pillars Over Inner Mongolia. So what do we see here? Well, here we see an image of the sky with these great streaks of light pointing up into the sky. Those are what we call light pillars. Now it's not an aurora, although you may see the similar glows. However, the colors are certainly not what you would expect from an aurora, where the lights are prominently green, and they're also not usually striped like this. Now this occurs when you get ice crystals near the ground. Normally they're up in the upper earth's upper atmosphere, and you will see things that occur like a sun pillar due to sunlight. When they get close to the ground, even lights on the ground can do the same sort of effect and give us this sort of beam going up in through the atmosphere of light. So when you get this kind of crystal fog from ice crystals close to the ground, that we can sometimes get something like this where the crystals are reflecting that light, giving us the appearance of a pillar here going up into the sky. Now you'll note that the numb parts of the sky are actually labeled here for you to be able to identify, and you see right in the middle of all of these light pillars is the big dipper, and that is Ursa Major. And you can see the handle pointing down toward the ground, parallel to partially to the light pillars, and then the bowl of the dipper going up, and then other parts of Ursa Major stretching out. Ursa Major is actually the constellation. The big dipper is what we call an asterism, or is just a part of that constellation. It's a bright grouping of stars. To the left, we can see Ursa Minor with the bright star Polaris, not the brightest star in the sky by far. In fact, about number 50, if you count by the brightest stars, but happens to be located near the north celestial pole. And because it's near the pole, it appears to stay in the same space spot in the sky. So all the other stars will appear to rotate around it. It's kind of the axis of the sky, just as the north pole would be the axis of the Earth. And we can also see off to the far right side, we can see the constellation of Leo, and that is another prominent constellation with the bright star Regulus as the brightest star in that constellation. Now, there's a couple other fainter constellations here. We see Lynx and Leo Minor as well as the constellation of Draco, which kind of wraps itself around the pole as the great dragon. So here we get to see all of those constellations up in the sky, and closer to ground, we see the light pillars extending upward in this scene taken in Inner Mongolia. So that was our picture of the day for March 4th of 2024. It was titled Light Pillars Over Inner Mongolia. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture, previewed to be Star Painters. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.