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.
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:
OMG, you say?
Well, you have no idea.
Check out Part II in the next post.
Wow and Wow!
ReplyDeleteSo amazing!
ReplyDelete