the colours rippling through these night skies are from atmospheric airglow and the gravity waves passing through them. airglow is the result of chemiluminescence in the thermosphere, where ultraviolet radiation from the sun excites atoms, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, which emit photons (or varying wavelengths of light that correspond to a colour on the visible spectrum) as they collide to form new molecules like nitric oxide.
airglow can look rippled when gravity (or buoyancy, and not gravitational) waves pass through the atmosphere. whether from the updraft of a storm or air moving over mountainous terrain, a wave can form in a stable layer of the atmosphere, which grows as it rises from the lessening atmospheric pressure.
The bioluminescent octopus (scientific name: Stauroteuthis syrtensis) is really weird. Seriously, their tentacles’ lengths don’t match up (they can stretch out to around fourteen inches though) and they’ve got web connecting them and they look like disgruntled floppy umbrellas. They’re also very pretty.
Okay, so maybe the weird thing about them is not that they look like umbrellas, but that they glow! This is a pretty strange quality for an octopod, considering the only other times anyone’s ever heard of these shenanigans were with two other species that had glowy rings around the mouths of breeding females (that’s actually really weird too, maybe I should have written about that).
They have about forty suckers called photophores that should be your average octopus suction-cup, but instead are genetically modified through evolution to do less suctioning and more glowing. They still have multiple traits of normal suckers, apparently, but a lot of the muscles usually found in them were replaced by cells to aid in bioluminescence instead.
The light fades out toward the end of the row of photophores and is supposedly used to scare off predators but also lure in prey. The other idea is that they use it to communicate, which sounds awesome because some of them some of them do blink their lights and twinkle like Christmas lights (that might be a little bit embellished, but you get the point), and it just sounds beautiful and these guys are awesome I rest my case thank you and goodnight
