Northern Lights Happening Starting Friday Night (May 10)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Well, I still have never seen northern lights, this time if only because it’s been mostly overcast here. But I learned from this thread that they’re usually much fainter than they appear in some of those impressive pictures, so I’ll have a better idea of what to expect next time. Also, it was probably laughable that I was trying to see them out my window, with neighbours’ backyard lights shining in my eyes!

I will say, though, that during one of the meteor shower events a few years ago, sitting on my back deck, I definitely saw a few unmistakably streaking through the night sky. You had to be patient and watch carefully, but it was pretty cool when you saw one.

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Rain and clouds again here last night. Might or might not be some clearing tonight. Anybody know if auroras are likely to continue?

I did see them once not all that far from here, back in the early 1970’s. Naked eye impressive.

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We missed them Friday night. I drove around last night looking for them, and stayed up 'til midnight. Never saw them. I’ve still never seen them in person. :frowning:

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Hope you’ll get a chance, Johnny. They’re cool, and also a little eery.

I served during Desert Storm but was never in a combat zone. I wasn’t even close. When the ground war was on, we had rotated to back fill for an artillery unit that was in Kuwait but had been scheduled to support a NATO exercise in northern Norway. So in the winter of 1990-1991, I was playing tourist 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle there, up near Narvik and Harstad. Operation Battle Griffin.

Norway is strikingly beautiful, with its fjords and dramatic mountains. The beer is good, and strong, and cheap. The people are friendly. Ski lift tickets are dirt cheap — some of the guys went but I did not go skiing. The residential areas could’ve been just like in the US but instead of kids’ bicycles laid down on the front lawn, families had skis and ski poles stabbed into the snow, standing vertically like totem poles standing on proud display near their front doors.

In the towns when the ladies went shopping, their babies were bundled up in strollers and they’d park them outside the front door of the small shops, right there on the sidewalk! It was stunning to see that. Those scenes of small town innocence could’ve been Norman Rockwell paintings.

The roads were covered in slick ice, and yet the locals and their cars with studded tires drove FAST on those winding mountain roads! I had tire chains on my hummvee, and those chains are heavy. I can imagine how heavy the chains are for the 5-ton trucks.

Ladies and grandmothers got around for their shopping on Norwegian kick sleds (images ➜ Norwegian kick sleds - Google Search), and they got around really well on them. I once asked an elderly lady if I could try hers, and I couldn’t stay upright if my life depended on it! All I needed was more practice.

In southern Norway there’s a town called Hell, and I was there when it was frozen over. :slightly_smiling_face:

And I got to see the northern lights, and that was cool.

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They can be as good to the naked eye as you see in pictures. But it really helps to have very dark skies and eyes that are well-adapted to the dark (full dark adjustment takes like a half hour, and will be ruined by looking at your phone).

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My wife was in Desert Storm as a Black Hawk pilot with the 101st Airborne.

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I hope her lungs weren’t affected by Saddam’s burning oil fields, and that otherwise she got back okay.

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The weirdest thing is to see a meteor in broad daylight. I mean, I have no idea what I saw and never heard anything about it, but I was riding my bicycle around 8am when there was a massive fireball in the sky. It was up about one or two thousand feet, I guess, descending in a sort of leisurely shower of flame for a few hundred feet. There was no sound. And nothing in the news, even though it about 5 miles south of a really big airport. But its descent looked a little too vertical and its immolation too total for an airplane.

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Boo makes a note to never mess with Mrs. LA.

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There’s no real way to estimate this, without sightings (preferably recordings) from multiple vantage points. None of the cues that humans normally use to estimate distance work on meteors.

But yeah, it’s quite possible to get a meteor visible in daylight. They’re rare, but they do happen. And most meteors, even if they survive to the surface, are never found.

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If a meteor was still a visible fireball (bolide), that would mean that it was still traveling at hypersonic speeds. If it was one or two thousand feet up, it would have passed by you in a fraction of a second, and you would have possibly had your internal organs turned to jelly by the shockwave. Think Chelyabinsk (which shattered windows and set off car alarms) but much, much closer. If you saw a bolide, it was tens of miles up.

(There is a similar thread in FQ where I stomp on cherished childhood memories in a 2017 bump.)

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  @Seanette and I ventured out last night, hoping to catch a sight of the aurora.  We knew it was a long shot, but we had to try.

  I figured that even if we couldn’t see it with ours eyes, perhap with a long exposure, my camera might catch something.

  Finding a place that we thought was dark enough, I did catch a glow to the North, but I think it was more likely the light pollution from Yuba City, about 17 miles away, than that it was aurora.

  To our eyes, the sky northward looked good, but looking south, back toward Sacramento, there was a lot of light pollution in that direction, even though we were a considerable distance away from it.

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Yeah, that definitely looks much more like light pollution than aurora.

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Apparently there is still a chance for tonight. And my forecast for tonight is only partly cloudy. Will hope.

Probably won’t hope hard enough to stay up all night if it’s still cloudy by 11 or 12 PM, though. – it was sunny a little while ago (around 6P here) but is now mostly clouds again. The clouds may come and go, they often do.

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Yes, brighter at the base says city lights to me.

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I stepped out a couple times last night ans Saturday but alas, between way south in central Arizona and light pollution – there’s a street light opposite the driveway – nothing was apparent.

Luckily I was in Iceland for 16 months and it was a fairly common sighting there, even though it was about at the mid-point down from solar max to solar min. One night when we were coming back to the main base after an eve-watch, it was so spectacular we stopped the bus and the dozen of us filed off to just stand there, mouths open, for a good ten minutes.

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Partly clear the first time I checked last night; and entirely clear the second. Light pollution around the horizon, sliver of moon, quite a few stars. No aurora, though; at least, not unless an aurora can look just like a meteor. Did see one of those, which I wasn’t expecting.

Guess I’ll settle for other people’s pictures. No way to tell how soon there’ll be another chance to see one for myself.

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