Winter is approaching
Thursday, September 25, 2003 | Permalink
The winter is approaching, and as the evenings become darker the spectacular shows on the northern skies begins to show up. Today a most marvelous northern light crossed the sky for a 5-10 minutes period. One of the most spectacular I've ever seen.
Often the northern light tends to be fairly static when it appears, or quite slowly moving. But today it was like huge blue-green flashes across the whole sky. You could almost see how wave after wave of sun-particles pumped into the athmosphere, causing huge stripes of light flapping in the solar wind. Further, the whole thing seemed to be centered in some kind of way right above our heads. Like when you put loads of metal particles on a piece of paper and go with a magnet under it and the particles form to a star pattern according to the magnetic field; that's how it looked in a giant pattern right over our heads, but kinda moving in the solar wind.
This is one of the good things of living far north. While we may freeze our balls off, we do at least get to see some really cool shows regularly on the sky. Today, a really good one.
Fortunately, I had the camera handily available in my pocket. Unfortunately, night photos isn't the strong point of this camera. Auto mode made nothing but black, manual with longest possible exposure turned out black too. Seems it needs at least something with a decent amount of light to be able to focus at all. So only the shots aimed at the nearby houses actually resulted in an image where you could see the actual northern light, but it's not the main part and doesn't make the real thing justice. A slightly higher res image
here. I'd recommend everyone to go up north some winter to around the artic circle or higher to see the thing in real life.
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1 comments |
Last comment by NeoKenobi (2003-09-25 21:18:36) ]
