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.