It was predicted to be a big one by the Geophysical Institute. So I went out around 10 PM, to our mushers field across the road from the cabin, and, yeah, it was beautiful. I stayed out for about an hour, it started to fade, then, deciding I'd seen the best show of the year I came in, crawled into bed, and tried to go to sleep. That had only been a warmup. It got so bright at times I could detect flashes of light through my closed eyelids, like lightning. Between 11:30 and 12:30 it was at its best, and I took most of the images from inside the house looking outside the kitchen window. The aurora is usually visible in the northern sky, but this display stretched across the sky from north to south and west to east. It was huge, incredibly bright, and I have to say, a little alarming. I tried videoing it but there is only a brief moment that it captured the image on my little crappy camera. To the naked eye it was an almost white light flashing across the western sky with some hints of red. These images are but dusty sketches compared to the actual display. Needless to say I didn't get much sleep. Even at 4:00 am I got awakened to find yet another set of white streaks dancing in the sky to the west. I can only imagine what I missed while I was sleeping!







sled dogs, battery blankets, outhouses in the snow, it's all here...
Showing posts with label aurora watching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aurora watching. Show all posts
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Curtains of Light
Feb 5, 2011 11:44:10 PM
Since we came up here we've seen several aurora displays. Most of the time it looks like fog or mist or some weird faint clouds that move in decidedly un-cloudlike ways. Once in awhile, like last night, you get some truly crazy light shows. Last year I tried taking movies but they came out black. This year I got smart and took still pictures.
What causes this strange and beautiful phenomenon? The sun emits streams of electrons that are drawn towards the earth's magnetic poles. Way up above us in upper reaches of our atmosphere, about 50 miles high, they react with gas molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen). The electrons hit the gas molecules like billiard balls, and the "balls" emit light upon being struck. There has to be some insanely high concentration of these particles to be able to see the light emitted in these reactions (several million charged particles per square centimeter or something like that).
Because this solar wind is drawn to both the North and South magnetic poles, the display we saw last night dancing over Fairbanks would have been seen in mirror-image by scientists stationed in the South Pole!!!
The first time you see an aurora you might be kind of disappointed in the lack of psychedelic colors--that is because photographs capture colors we don't really experience. I tried to show what the actual hues are compared to what the camera sees.
Kinetically, the aurora moves and flows like slow motion lightning--it just rolls, swirls, pulsates, gyrates. You must come up and see it for yourself!
11:44:48
11:44:59
11:52:53 PM, original color from camera is very green
11:52:53 PM, what we see with the naked eye
11:59:35
12:00:31 AM
12:02:18
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