Flashback Friday

Aurora Borealis - Norrsken

    A few years back we were coming back from a backcountry ski trip in Alaska. A friend of ours told us that tonight will be a spectacular night for Auroras. It's so funny, if there is a big chance for aurora, the whole town will now about it (or so it seems) at least all your friends will now about it. One of the great things about having an outhouse is that it actually forces you out, sometimes in the middle of the night, and a lot of those times you end up stargazing and watching the Aurora as it flares in the sky above you. Either way, I was ready for Aurora that night. It's really a hit or miss. Sometimes the conditions for Aurora are optimal, and yet nothing happens. Sometimes the forecast is low and you witness a show out of this world just because you had to pee in the middle of the night. 

    This night I was out for several hours taking pictures. I hadn't been doing much aurora photography back then so the quality is not great, but I think you get the picture. 

The Sound of Aurora Borealis

    This is also the one and only time that the Aurora made me scared, I don't know of what or how, but It just made me so scared. Like this really uncomfortable feeling, and it happened along with the sparkling sound I heard. It was almost like too overwhelming, and I felt as if the sky would fall down, or at least the Aurora, because the light was so intense. I remember that my cats were freaking out too, because I was outside and they were inside. It was a debate before if you could actually hear the Aurora or not, but it's confirmed, you can, or something.

    "A recording produced Sept. 9, 2011 during a geomagnetic storm by using three microphones and a VLF antenna picked up 20 similar clap sounds," Laine reported last week on his website. "Some of them were close enough in order to be detected by all three microphones. The collected data allowed the estimation of the location of the sound source. The sound source was the open sky." - ADN

    Isn't it amazing, that there are so many things we still don't know about. We have only discovered a tiny little percentage of all the universe, and we keep finding more and more species on earth, almost at the same rate as others go extinct :( .

    Have you ever heard the Aurora?