Dancing Lights

OK, I have converted the big file into a different version. It affects the detail but I hope you can get the general idea. (Recognize any voices in the background?)

 

 

Last Night of Lights

We are actually, finally, in a hotel room in SXM having arrived after 24 hours of traveling only to be stuck, once again, 5 miles from home for lack of a nighttime ferry option to Anguilla. Since I am up early with jet lag with nowhere to go, I will make use of this time to post a  blog. I believe at my last post we were heading out on our third and final Aurora Chase. We had been stupid crazy lucky with the completely clear skies we experienced on our first two nights. We realize that plenty of people go looking for the Northern Lights and end up seeing little to nothing. But we still wanted another good viewing.

The night started out cold. I mean really cold. I mean Michael even tucked himself into an arctic suit. Actually everyone except the tour guides bundled up that night as we headed inland to literally race against the incoming cloud cover. Even so, we stopped within 30 minutes for a quick peak at a display. If you were wondering how aurora compares to clouds viewed through a camera here is a quick pic:

We were encouraged for another good show as we found our way to a beach to hunker down for the night. (As an aside here, when Noora, our guide, came back to the bus to announce that there was a good spot on the beach to camp, we were expecting something a bit different. This "beach" was covered with boulders...not even pebbles. Big, round, rocking, well, rocks. Remind me to send Noora a picture of what a REAL beach!)

But in spite of the clouds the viewing was still pretty good. Every night had been different, though, and this third night the sky ended up just filled with green light. Just a huge glow.

 

And that's pretty much how the night looked, off and on. True to form, though, as we were sitting around the campfire around midnight getting bored because the lights had disappeared, Michael pointed off to the horizon and said, "hey that looks like something could happen". So I jumped up, hobbled over the rocks, and as soon as I got to the camera, the dancing started. Again, the spinning in circles, looking everywhere at once, can't catch it on film, movement of the lights. But this time, with a whole lot of pink. The problem with the pink nitrogen color is that it burns really bright. So it, sadly, tends to come out over exposed and white on film. Even the tour guide's pictures (and she has more experience with this than we do) doesn't show it. So I toned down the color on this next picture (you will notice how different the green looks) just to bring out some of the pink. I hope it illustrates it enough.

 

I also have a couple of videos of movement that the guide posted from the second night that I will try to post (they are big files) once I am home. Suffice it to say, you need to see the Aurora for yourself. It is amazing and not surprising that ancient peoples would have been hard pressed to explain the lights.

 

In fact, in Finland the word for the northern lights is revontulet which translates to firefox because they believed that the lights were caused by sparks that flew off a fox's tail as he rain through the snow. Which plays in nicely to our narrative, since our next and final stop was Helsinki.

 



 

Quiz time

Clearly, I am not a particularly didactic travel blogger. A little eccentric maybe. But educational? Not routinely. However, typically once in a trip I throw in a quiz. Let's do that now while I am waiting, tired but not able to nap, for our last chasing lights tour tonight.

First, as an aside, there are other beautiful sights here in Norway besides the Northern Lights. According to our guide, Thomas, one of the owners of the Chasing Lights company, there are some 150,000 islands in Norway. So we picked up two new beach samples for our sand collection at home while we were here.

Another of Norway's natural wonders are the fjords.

So first question?
What is the difference between and fjord and a bay?

Apparently a fjord IS a bay but rather than being created by erosion it was created by glacial activity resulting in steep sides.

Next question.

Here in Tromso people refer to the cute little church in town and the bigger, newer cathedral across the water. But the church is really the cathedral and the cathedral is really the church.

So what determines which is which? (My Catholic friends might want to field this one.)

Apparently, the cathedral is the principal church in a Catholic diocese where the Bishop has his 'cathedra' or throne.

So, now a picture of us at a fjord:

 

 

And off we go, again.



 

We're So Lucky!

Day two in Tromso and some clouds rolled in. We were worried that our second night of Chasing the Lights would be impacted. But one of the reasons that we came to Tromso and signed up for these night chases is that the tour folks will drive you all the way to Finland if they have to in order to find a break in the clouds. So passports in hand, just in case, we hauled our tired asses back on that bus and kept hope alive.

Our tour guides for the night reassured us. Apparently low clouds are bad for aurora viewing. Middle clouds are a bit of a deterrent, but high clouds don't tend to cause any problems and that's what the majority of the forecasted clouds were. So off we went.

And before we were hardly out of town, at just 6:30P we all poured out of the bus to see our first little show of the evening. A very encouraging start. And off we went again to find more darkness.

We settled in on a nice beach with a lighted bridge in the distance and waited. The clouds actually cleared so it turned into a sparkling sky. There were little shows from time to time. And while we realize that some people travel all this way and don't even see that much, we tried not to be too whiny. There were even some little bioluminescent organisms in the water that would shine bright when the waves hit the sand that were trying hard to appease/impress us in the absence of stunning aurora displays.

Then when we settled in to have dinner, soups bowls in hand, just about 10:30P again like the first night, things got exciting and the reflections of the lights on the water just added to the drama:

There were even some purple colors showing up:





And crazy displays like this:

All pretty damn impressive. We were all pretty happy. Then things calmed down and we just sat around the fire kind of waiting for the guides to pack up so we could go home and sleep. And then all of a sudden all living hell broke loose. I wish I had pictures to capture it. But it happened so fast and it was all right up above us across the whole freaking sky that I can only hope that the one guide managed to capture some video to send to us.

It was like fireworks exploding. Or even better watch this video at the 3:07 mark and imagine this kind of drama in colors in the sky above you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5SxEkRkkOU
(watch the whole video sometime because she is an amazing artist but that little bit for sure)
We were all just spinning in circles saying "look there". "no over there". "omg right above your head." Even the guides were going crazy. It was insanely impressive. Tears come to my eyes right now just writing about it.

Yup. We're so lucky.

A Dream Come True Part II

(Spoiler Alert: if for some reason you see this post before you see Part I....stop and go find Part I before continuing)

OK, so we are now getting some impressive displays in the sky. And that is the other thing about the Aurora. The camera only catches a little bit of the sky. When you see our pictures, like everyone else's pictures, you will think all of the action takes place on the horizon. That's because that is what makes the prettiest pictures with something stable there to anchor the image and give it perspective. But now I understand the advice I was given by the helpful cashier at the mini market the first night we were here. I wanted to at least look for the lights when we were stuck in the city so I asked him to forgive my ignorance, but should I be looking north? He said no, look up. Up? He said, yes, they fill the whole sky. But we don't think about that because we are seeing those artistic images of the horizon. But damn if they don't go straight across the sky. And, of course, they change all the time. Sometimes slowly....mostly brightening and fading. But sometimes fast.

We don't have video. No idea how you get that but it likely requires far more impressive cameras than we have. But once things really heated up at 10:30P it was two hours of light show movement. I was just spinning in circles, again like a little kid but now in my arctic suit and boots, saying, "ooh, look there. Oh no over there. Oh man, behind you now." As the whole sky kept changing. At times, the lights would start to break up in vertical lines like this:

 

And then they would start to spin and swirl and at one point the movement rippled through an S-shaped curve of light that looked like someone cracking a whip. Again, no video, but here are three separate images taken within 60 seconds...(they are blurrier because they are moving throughout an 8 second exposure)



 

 

The whole experience was overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Even the guide ran for his camera in the end and rated the evening a 9 out of 10. We go out again tonight and tomorrow night. The odds of seeing this kind of display are pretty slim. But I wouldn't miss taking that chance. It's why we are here. Michael always says, "you can sleep when you are dead."

 

A poster on the wall of the restaurant here at the hotel this morning also said it pretty well:

 

"Eat Well Travel Often".

 





A Dream Come True Part I

To be cliché, the stars aligned for us last night.

We bundled up in as many layers of sadly lacking cold weather clothes as we could muster and toddled out like the kids in the movie, Christmas Story, with hope in our hearts on what turned out to be a stellar, clear night in Tromso.

First things first. Our guide (a phD theoretical physicist a la Big Bang Theory) explained to us that the pictures you see of the Northern Lights are not at all like the images you see with your own naked eye. Here is a good link I found that explains it in detail ( http://futurism.com/how-we-see-the-aurora-borealis-camera-vs-human-eyes-2 ); but in a nutshell, the human eye is limited in what colors it perceives in darkness while your camera is not. The images are not photoshopped. They are just more accurate in their depiction of the true colors. That means that with weaker displays of the lights, in real life you can see something that looks only like a slightly illuminated cloud in the sky. So we drove a way and then the guide would jump out of the van and snap a picture of a glow to see if it was really an aurora sighting.

The first time he had us get out of the car what we saw was a grayer version of this:

We were, of course, crazy with excitement. The sky was unbelievably clear (as you can see from the stars) and it was only 7P. We had hours ahead of us to see more. So when this spectacle died down, we jumped back into the bus to a new spot. Where we saw this:

 

The sky is darker. The cone is brighter. And we could begin to appreciate the green color without peeking at the camera. (And we caught one of the four shootings stars we happened to see.) Now we are even more stoked. Off we went to our third and final stop. Where just as we were sitting down around the fire getting ready to eat our stew, things really started to get interesting.

 

OMG, you say?

Well, you have no idea.

Check out Part II in the next post.

 



 

The North Pole

We arrived into Tromso, Norway last night. I had been wondering how close we would be to the Arctic Circle....if someone would tell me if/when I crossed north of it. Well, looking at this map:

We are already there!

Surprisingly, mercifully, it didn't seem ridiculously cold last night. And that was without the benefit of arctic suits and boots and such that will be available to us on our chasing the northern lights tours.

Plus it was crystal clear last night. We could see stars even here in town. That is step one in viewing the aurora. Step two is having the aurora show up at all. Sometimes the lights are strong enough to be visible from here in town even with the ambient light. So I peeked out my window all night long, but nothing.

Fingers crossed for when we go out searching tonight.

Meanwhile, we have a Fjords day trip scheduled for today which should be more than lovely.

So more later.