 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. One of the things that I like to do in each of my introductory astronomy classes is to begin the class with the astronomy picture of the day. From the NASA website that is apod.nasa.gov slash apod. And today's picture for November 6th of 2023 while it is titled Red Aurora over Italy. So what do we see here? Well, here we see an image of the sky and on the left hand side we see our own Milky Way galaxy stretching from the lower left to the top center of the image. Now that's our Milky Way as we see it from within. That is our spiral galaxy and that's what a spiral galaxy looks like when you see it from inside or from an edge on view instead of looking down on it from another angle. Now the other thing we're looking at here is off to the right is the red glow there. Now that's not a forest fire or anything that is actually a glow in the sky and that is part of the aurora. Now the aurora occur when charged particles from the sun excite atoms in Earth's atmosphere. They're funneled along the magnetic field and that means that they normally occur very far north or south. So we typically see them in Scandinavia and Northern Canada and Alaska. However here we're seeing it over Italy. Now that's a little bit farther south than we usually see the aurora. Now this can happen when we have intense emissions of particles that can deform Earth's magnetic field. So when this happens and this image was taken just a day ago we will begin to see aurora at lower latitude than typically seen. So that's what we're seeing here. Those atoms are being excited in Earth's upper atmosphere. Generally atoms of oxygen and nitrogen which make up most of our atmosphere. And sometimes they give a green glow when they're a little bit lower down in the atmosphere. If they're up higher then we can get a distinct red glow. So this is something to look for over the coming years at lower latitudes, not close to the equator. That would take a massive storm to get anything close to the equator. But at regions that we normally would not see the aurora are going to be able to see some with coming storms as the sun becomes more and more active over the next couple of years approaching its maximum. So the solar activity reaches a peak about every 11 years and that will be doing another year or two to reach the peak of max of its activity. And now we're getting close to that so we're seeing a little bit more of that activity than we were seeing several years ago when the sun was at its minimal activity. So we can look for more things like the aurora here as seen over Italy and we can also expect to see it at other comparable latitudes around the world over the next couple of years. So that was our picture of the day for November 6th of 2023. It was titled Rhet aurora over Italy. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be Devil on Mars. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.