“Airglow” is defined as a luminosity or “glowing” given off by the Earth’s own atmosphere. Marshall Shepherd describes the science of airglow in a recent blog post at Forbes.com here. It turns out that what we think of as airglow (not to be confused with aurora) is actually a collection of several different phenomena.
Jason Samenow of Capital Weather Gang also provided a link to a short video from the International Space Station showing some spectacular images of airglow (as well as a bunch of lightning strikes). You can find it here.
