(copyright NASA)
Wednesday, January 7
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I am...
Archived Posts
-
▼
2009
(359)
-
▼
January
(15)
- Mars is red.No, I mean really, really red. For som...
- REPOWER AMERICA.Once seemingly reduced to a punchl...
- Mastodon, unlovely thingWoe betide you in the mode...
- Tired of being sickSick of being tiredWhy does my ...
- No oneShould have to journey so far into fearThat ...
- Leonardo, that old trickster!First he's got John t...
- 1,500th Post.Yay.****News & Tidbits.I'm looking to...
- Don't worry, it's ok.Life may seen Absurd, philsop...
- Sophia.Find out for yourselfI can can only guide y...
- No title
- From the"Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out...
- (copyright NASA)
- "Two Things"a mini quiz.Ok, this isn't THE quiz, b...
- Ok, so I opened the pantry to get some soup, but i...
- This is not a pipe.(René Magritte - 1928)
-
▼
January
(15)
8 comments:
*sigh* I do so love those colours. They seem magical.
I was reading about trips to Lapland on the plane yesterday and how you could see the Northern Lights there. Instead, I landed back in Spain and got grey skies and snow.
:-(
Giusi Barbianni, my old penpal from junior high and high school, who not long ago found me after all these years on Facebook, is obviously Italian, but she now lives in Sweden translating books between 4 or 5 different languages.
Anyway, she just posted to say she IS in Lapland at the moment, and can see sights like this (though the exposure time makes the photos much more vivid) every night. Lucky for her. :-|
Mmm... the Aurora Borealis... I'm sure it is beautiful. My only problem is in seeing that, the cold. :) I should travel very far northway to see those beautiful lights...
I'd love to as well =)
The furthest north I've been is probably Moscow, though I've been to Canada a few times. But not far enough north in either case (near the arctic circle) to see the aurora.
I haven't been any further north than Aberdeeen. And that was cold enough. Seal skins will be needed before I venture any further pole(y)ward.
Lucky Giusi. And clever too if she can speak that many languages well enough to earn a living translating between them. I wouldn't get any of it done though. I'd sit and watch the sky instead.
Believe it or not. My mom, Justin's Grandma, sent me photos of the northern lights taken from the Yukon, but she told me that where she grew up in Kansas!! (middle of USA), they saw them on occasion. Kansas is flat so I guess it's possible. I'll check to see if it's possible (not that I don't believe her ;o}
It IS possible. They been seen as far south as Texas, but very rarely.
What happens is the intensity of the radiation that the sun puts out varies quite a bit, from "solar minimum" to "solar maximum". And some solar maxiums are worse that others. The more sunspots are present, the more solar prominences (flares) there are, the more whacked out it's magnetic field is, and the more radiation it flings in all directions, including earth of course.
So during a period of extreme high solar actvitiy, the ionosphere of the earth, which is created because the earth is a big magnet too, with two poles and generating invisible lines of the same kind of force (which makes it repulsive, so to speak, to the sun's rays), shield up from all that excess solar radiation, which is a nice feature that the earth comes with.
As it does so, oxygen and other molecules in the atmosphere become ionized and glow, exactly by the process which makes a neon lamp glow or any kind of gas fluoresce. They kick out photons, which we see as lights of various pretty colors, and some join back together to form O3, or ozone. Other recombines into normal oxygen (O2), and other gasses chance their states slightly as well.
That is why the northern lights appear to look like sheets or drapes; they flow along the magnetic lines erupting from the magnetic poles and tracing big rainbows into the ionosphere. And during a really instense solar storm, enough energy will be channeled safely down these solar "lightning rods" into the earth's crust that on a dark night they make extend high enough and be bright enough to be seen from places like Kansas or Rome.
Again, it's rare, but it does happen. Or so I've read.
Pardon all the typos and horrible ungrammatical sentences. This has been happening to me a lot lately and I'm not sure why. Something's affecting the language part of my brain, very likely this "new" pill I'm still on. It's known to have side effects like not being able to get words out, or to skip words completely, or to lose your ability to spell or make sense of words, in it's most extreme form. I'd quit taking it if it got worse. For now I have to seemingly double- and triple-check everything; I used to be proud of the fact that I could speed-type through an email or essay one time and make almost zero mistakes. The cosmos is getting me back big time now for that pride... :-|
Post a Comment