Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Aurora Painted The Sky Again!

It's been quite some time since I posted  northern-lights occurrences, though there had been lots of them this year except in the summer when the brightness of the night washed out these colorful lights. 

The summer nights started to get dark in late August, and that's when we started seeing the auroras again. But then, summer this year didn't really go well, what with all the showery days and overcast night sky, which went on until autumn. That means that we missed all those strong auroral activities these past months. The first one that I watched this season was that on September 28-29. And then came other intense ones on October 13th and 19th. After that, the sky was mostly overcast, and if ever it was clear, the aurora borealis was quiet.

And then, on November 7 (I call it 7/11), as the evening grew and deepened into night, the green lights gradually spread across the sky, their vivid colors unhampered by the intense light of the waning gibbous.










It was a long-term activity, with up to Kp 7 magnitude,  that extended to the 10th of this month. Each night, the show went on, though I missed the acme of the following nights' shows.

The first night was the best I've seen in this series. From its faint inception, the light kept intensifying and exuding strong colors of green, pink and purple, gracefully fluttering, dancing, gliding across the sky, and then fading, subsiding. After a few minutes, the light sparked again from where it faded and fluttered across to the opposite direction.
















Actually, at times, several lights flared simultaneously from different parts of the sky, each of them moving swiftly and racing against each other, making it quite hard to photograph with a lens that can cover only a fraction of the whole show. So I just pointed my camera here and there. While waiting to complete the full exposure, I would usually miss the best parts of the show, such as the bursting of the corona.

(click on the smaller images for enlarged viewing)

































The important thing in watching the aurora borealis, though, is the enjoyment of viewing the amazingly colorful movements of the northern lights all over the sky, the bliss that I feel as I stand under these showers of light and get a refreshing soul-bath.












"Even from a dark night, 
songs of beauty can be born."
 - Mary Anne Radmacher





1 comment:

  1. Great post. Thanks for sharing these wonderful pictures with us. I am planning my trip to see the northern lights.

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