Aurora Borealis or Northern Sunrise are supposed to be in winter, right? Wrong. They will occur whenever it pleases our Sun. Last Sunday, a solar eruption occurred. The particles cast away from the Sun travelled the 93 million miles through space in about 2 days.
They arrived in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and started exciting atoms. Once these atoms came to rest, they emitted light… Light that we have come to know as Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. More frequently seen in winter because of the dark nights, they can also occur in summer.
It’s the same principle as in a standard neon tube. If we could take out the phosphorous coating inside the tube, the result would be a faint greenish hue, instead of greenish white light.
Now, taking pictures of an aurora is not as exciting as taking pictures of a football match or wildlife, therefore this time in this blog post there is not much text. I don’t feel like going into the technical details of how an aurora starts. All that is important is that this time, we didn’t have to freeze our fingers off to see one.
Bug spray was welcome though, the mosquitoes were out and having a party with me as a Meal-On-Wheels snack…
Most of the pictures here are taken at ISO 800 or 1600, 15-30 seconds and aperture WIDE OPEN. Of course I should also take care of the focus next time, apparently setting the lens to infinity does not give the results I expected.
Anyway, the pictures are nice and I wanted to share them here.
Some people talk about “crackling sounds” when there is an aurora overhead. Well, I didn’t hear anything, I guess that the storm was not violent enough.
On this blog there is a little place on the right that constantly gives the solar wind and aurora conditions. You can take a look from time to time to see what the conditions will be for the next few hours.
For yesterday’s conditions
Hopefully tonight there will be more to see, unless the promised thunderstorms really come true.
Let’s see tonight, for these auroras to be seen, a trip out of the city is necessary, no transport=no aurora=no pictures. I’ll hope for the best and post more about this whenever possible.