Photo of the Day

Northern lights above a house
January 26, 2009

Northern Lights, Trapper Creek, Alaska

Spectacular sky shows brighten the long winter nights for Alaska's year-round residents. This display of northern lights sets the horizon aglow at Trapper Creek. Stars of the Big Dipper, upper left, wheeling through the December sky, show as streaks in this ten-minute exposure. Residents of the region witness dozens of auroras yearly; those in the Point Barrow area farther north see as many as a hundred.

(Photo shot on assignment for "Nomad in Alaska's Outback," April 1969, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie

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