Abstract
Airglow has been known for many years to astronomers as a potential difficulty to deep sky photography. Recently, studies of airglow have gained in importance, not only for purely scientific reasons, but also due to the obvious link between airglow appearance and some of the ground-based or tropospheric potentially severe phenomena.
Research of airglow from space has been enabled with the launch of the Suomi-NPP satellite (November 2011), with its low-light sensitive Day-Night Band (DNB). On moonless nights, DNB is capable of detecting airglow, including its various wave-like patterns.
Waves in airglow can be generated by various mechanisms, gravity waves being the most important among these. The paper summarizes the present concepts of airglow formation and its interactions with vertically propagating gravity waves.
It also provides an example of rippled airglow, as observed from the ground, and an almost simultaneously captured example from space by the Suomi-NPP satellite.