NavList:

Sean C, you wrote:
"But it was bright enough to immediately draw my attention. I've never seen anything like it."

Extraordinary, isn't it? It's like someone hits the "special effects" switch and starts painting with light across the sky... Thursday night's show will be remembered for a long time (see attached) because it penetrated to mid-latitudes and --I think equally important-- because it happened during convenient hours for many casual observers. For the US east coast the storm peak seems to have been between 7:00 and 9:00pm Eastern time. In northern Europe I understand many people watched it all night long.

Myself I was on a flight from New York to London. We were supposed to depart the gate at 6:00pm but we were delayed an hour due to an "engineering problem". By the time we reached about 5000 feet over Long Island it was dark enough to see stars. Though the plane was full, I had managed to secure the window seat in the last row on the left side (Airbus A330 which is a wide-body with many seats in the center section a long way from any window). The pilot then announced "for those of you on the left side of the airplane, there's an amazing view... [what? the lights of Long Island?? ...he paused, a bit speechless] ...a great view of the northern lights." I looked and, sure enough, but it was difficult for all the usual in-flight reasons. I heard a couple of flight attendants in the food service section right behind me who said they couldn't see a thing. And at least in the last couple of dozen rows, I didn't see anyone looking out the windows. But they were missing out...

From my window seat, by cupping my hands to the window to block out some fraction of the cabin lighting (still on at that point), I could see a couple of huge red streamers and some "clouds" low down, which in retrospect were probably green aurorae. I fell asleep for several hours... Mid-Atlantic and middle of the night, I woke up again. The cabin was now dark, and I couldn't take my eyes off the sky. All across the northern horizon extending up to about 15° altitude, there was a near continuous band of light overlaid with shifting spikes that looked so much like patterns of iron filings spilled out to demonstrate a magnetic field --I could see the Earth's magnetic field lines. Very little color was visible. Photography, as attached below, makes the northern lights look brilliantly colorful, but our night vision is nearly monochrome, and the patterns that I could see were usually just grey. Once every five minutes or so, a brighter spike would rise up climbing beyond the narrow viewing range of my cabin window, and some of those showed a hint of red. The stars were impressive, too. As the night wore on and the Summer Triangle headed toward the northwest horizon, I could plainly see the star clouds in Cygnus, even with some interference from the northern lights! I so much needed to sleep, but how could I look away? It was amazing...

There has been extensive media coverage of this show, and I'm sure we'll be seeing images for years from this spectacle. I'm attaching a teaser from the New York Times where the story was featured prominently.

I'm in London now. I got minimal sleep Thursday night on the flight, but I managed to stay awake last night for a little Shakespeare... I saw a Scottish man performing in the Scottish Play. And that was almost as spectacular as a sky full of the northern lights!

Frank Reed

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