perfidy

ISS Astronauts, not having any real purpose in furthering our conquest of space, took some time off for photography.  Given their privileged vantage point, something like this was bound to come into view eventually.

And that is a pretty amazing something.

Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian physicist and discoverer of the electric currents that bear his name was the first to suggest an electrical explanation for the aurora.  He spent months in the far north, in the deep cold observing and measuring the aurora and divining their nature.  His theories were for decades ignored in favor of the theories of the English mathematician Sydney Chapman, finally being proven right after the advent of space travel.  Birkeland is something of a hero to the plasma cosmology types - he is an archetype for them - brilliant, nominated for the Nobel, dismissed for decades in favor of ideas that were later proved wrong.

The idea that electrical currents connect the various bodies of the Solar System is central to the plasma cosmologist's conception of the universe.  Birkeland was the first in the chain.  In the write-up for that picture, there's this:

This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can't see the southernmost continent in the photograph.

Interesting, no?  We admit that there are electrical phenomena throughout the solar system - Earth and Jupiter's magnetic fields, the braided electrical currents discovered trailing Venus in her orbit, the aurora - seen on many planets, sprites and elves seen above thunderstorms and shooting into space, the coronal mass ejections and numerous other phenomena on and around the sun and their proven effects on Earth - yet there is evidently great resistance to viewing these as a part of a larger, connected whole.  Gravity is all.