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Shafts of light to Heaven
We had the most incredible aurora borealis last night. About 12:30 a.m., I'd wandered into the darkened kitchen to get a drink of water before bed, and happened to look out the window at a sky full of light, so bright I could see it clearly without my glasses. (I'm so tremendously nearsighted that I often can't see the aurora, at least as anything other than a vague green blur, if I don't have my glasses on.)
Last night was probably somewhere in the mid to upper 30s (temperature wise) but we spent as much time as we could stand in bathrobes and bare feet on the new second story of the deck, watching an incredibly fast-racing, unfolding aurora with shades from green to white, red and purple. Then I had to come back inside to get a coat and shoes, and I went out into the front yard to watch some more -- the husband went to bed at this point -- and that's when it got just incredible, the sort of thing you probably will only see a few times in a lifetime even if you live in a place that gets auroras a lot (as we do). It was right overhead -- I think that's one of the things that made this one so amazing, because normally they're somewhat to the north of us, but this one filled the sky and the center was almost directly over us -- and as the fast-moving, spiraling and swirling activity began to slow down, it started breaking up into discrete, incredibly tall shafts of light. I've been trying to find a good image of what I mean, and this image is about the closest I can find, but directly overhead, so that they were radiating down onto me from everywhere. They seemed to shoot straight up to the stars. It was amazing.
Once I could tear myself away, I went and woke up the husband, making squeaky "You will not believe this! You have to see this!" noises. Sadly, by the time we got outside, it had died down considerably, and never really got bright again. It was still all over the sky, though, to the north and the south. I imagine this one was probably visible at points farther south than you can normally see them. By the time we finally went in around 1:30, it had died away to the faintest whispers of light.
And I would've missed it if I hadn't been looking out the window by pure chance, with the house lights off so that I could see it.
I need to look at the sky more.
ETA: I found a video on Youtube that shows something fairly similar to what I was looking at -- this is a time-lapse of photographic images, but this is about the speed at which it was moving (even faster in some cases, especially when those big swirls would unroll across the sky, or brighter flashes would propagate down the whole curtain of light - you can see that happening a little bit on the lower band of color at about 2:39-46). And it has the shafts-of-light thing at the end, too.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/370177.html with
comments.
Last night was probably somewhere in the mid to upper 30s (temperature wise) but we spent as much time as we could stand in bathrobes and bare feet on the new second story of the deck, watching an incredibly fast-racing, unfolding aurora with shades from green to white, red and purple. Then I had to come back inside to get a coat and shoes, and I went out into the front yard to watch some more -- the husband went to bed at this point -- and that's when it got just incredible, the sort of thing you probably will only see a few times in a lifetime even if you live in a place that gets auroras a lot (as we do). It was right overhead -- I think that's one of the things that made this one so amazing, because normally they're somewhat to the north of us, but this one filled the sky and the center was almost directly over us -- and as the fast-moving, spiraling and swirling activity began to slow down, it started breaking up into discrete, incredibly tall shafts of light. I've been trying to find a good image of what I mean, and this image is about the closest I can find, but directly overhead, so that they were radiating down onto me from everywhere. They seemed to shoot straight up to the stars. It was amazing.
Once I could tear myself away, I went and woke up the husband, making squeaky "You will not believe this! You have to see this!" noises. Sadly, by the time we got outside, it had died down considerably, and never really got bright again. It was still all over the sky, though, to the north and the south. I imagine this one was probably visible at points farther south than you can normally see them. By the time we finally went in around 1:30, it had died away to the faintest whispers of light.
And I would've missed it if I hadn't been looking out the window by pure chance, with the house lights off so that I could see it.
I need to look at the sky more.
ETA: I found a video on Youtube that shows something fairly similar to what I was looking at -- this is a time-lapse of photographic images, but this is about the speed at which it was moving (even faster in some cases, especially when those big swirls would unroll across the sky, or brighter flashes would propagate down the whole curtain of light - you can see that happening a little bit on the lower band of color at about 2:39-46). And it has the shafts-of-light thing at the end, too.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/370177.html with
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I hope someday you're far enough north to see one!
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Count yourself lucky that you managed to see something so wonderful!
I've never seen a "North- or Polar-light" (as we call them) simply, because I've never been that far north.
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IZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ envious
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Southern Cross.
The sky so clear that I felt I might be able to reach up and touch
it...............
It has rather bittersweet memories too as it was shortly after that
trip that my father died.
He was the one who pointed it out to me when we were in New Zealand.
Would love to see an aurora borealis
BTW we visited your lovely state one summer. I will never forget
how it never quite got dark.............here in Pacific NW during summer
it is often not totally dark till 10PM but up there it was never totally dark from what I recall.
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Yes, our summers here are very bright! Where I grew up (near Anchorage) it would get dim but not totally dark. Where I live now, Fairbanks, it doesn't even grow dim. From mid-May to mid-July, it's bright enough that you can read a book outside at midnight.
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She said "It never does get entirely dark does it??"
Last night it 9PM and I went from the den into the kitchen and passed by the dining room which has a recessed skylight and there was sufficient light still to illuminate the dining room........so it is fairly light here also at night until very late.
My clerical secretary Sandy told me when she lived in Alaska
a lot of people suffered from cabin fever......I forget now where her husband was posted. He was a pilot, not military but commercial.
Finally, when I was a teenager, dad received orders to Kodiak which we were all excited about. Then about three weeks later they were pulled and we went to Japan instead.
I don't regret that we went to Japan, but still but it would have been very cool to have gone to Kodiak.......
In my mind, Alaska was a frontier, which really appealed to me.
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I grabbed an all weather coat. and headed out, too. My mother had given it to me earlier that week. My mother had owned it for a couple of years but had not worn it and thought I might have some use for it. It was navy with a leather collar. As I went out to the lawn, I heard a faint crackling sound. I thought maybe it was the collar against my hair and there was static or that the leather had dried out in my mother's closet and was crackling (I didn't actually know whether leather did this or not, but at 3 in the morning, it seemed like a reasonable hypothesis.) However, it stopped as soon as the light show was over and when I went inside and looked at the collar, the leather was perfectly good Later, online, I read about some people claiming they heard the aurora. However, that possibility seem to be refuted by experts who pointed out theoretically why you should not be able to hear an aurora. One person who heard it synthesized the sound they heard and put an audio clip online. It was exactly the soft swishing crackle I had thought was coming from the coat.
Anyway, I'm glad you got to see one of the really magnificent displays.
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