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Rare glow-in-the-dark noctilucent clouds have recently appeared in the skies over the United Kingdom, and it’s claimed to be the most intense display yet these past two decades. These clouds may look to be in space, but they’re really inside Earth’s atmosphere, in a layer called the mesosphere ranging from 50 to 85 km high.
What some may not know is that the mesosphere is not only very cold (-125°C), but also very dry, or around 100-million times dryer than air from the Sahara desert. However, noctilucent clouds are made of water, consisting of tiny ice crystals about the size of particles in cigarette smoke. Sunlight that is scattered by these crystals gives the clouds their characteristic blue color. Now if only we could see clouds like the ones on Jupiter.
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Noctilucent clouds are a relatively new phenomenon. They were first seen in 1885″ about two years after the powerful eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which hurled plumes of ash as high as 80 km into Earth’s atmosphere,” said Gary Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies NLCs.
