Yay! I’m on Spaceweather!

 photography
Aug 072011
 

Spaceweather.com posted one of my aurora photos:

The show was not restricted to Canada. Northern Lights spilled across the border into the United States as far south as Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska. (Note: The faint red lights photographed in Nebraska are typical of low-latitude auroras during major geomagnetic storms.) Observers in Europe as far south as England, Germany and Poland also witnessed a fine display. Browse the gallery for more examples.

Mine is the Utah photo, as may be apparent.

 Posted by at 5:09 pm

  One Response to “Yay! I’m on Spaceweather!”

  1. Pat Flannery says:
    August 7, 2011 at 11:01 pm

    Congrats!
    I wonder if the reddish color at the base isn’t the Aurora itself, but rather seeing its glow through some sort of atmospheric haze at low altitude, like smoke or dust?
    The few times I’ve seen red ones, the glow went all the way to the top of the rays.
    It’s real shame you haven’t seen some of the ones we have had up here in North Dakota while I was growing up, as you’d be bouncing off the walls…imagine having them covering the entire sky from horizon-to-horizon, casting shadows on the ground, and being bright enough to read by.
    I actually saw that once.
    What was really fun was when a friend from Bombay, India, completely freaked during a drunken party when the aurora revealed that the silhouettes of bats could be seen flying a few feet above his head.
    Actually, the town is thick with them at night in summer, but their sonar keeps them from running into you, and the darkness hides their presence, so you almost never realize that they are there.*
    I once saw one that apparently had some sort of hearing problem fly straight into a chain-link fence and fall to the ground with a “clunk” sound as it bounced off, then fly off again a few seconds later.

    * Although it came as quite a shock when I got a pair of 80mm binoculars for star watching and could see them flying up in their hundreds from the park a couple of blocks to my house’s south as night fell, as they were silhouetted against the dark blue sky and stars in the binoculars.

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