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The Aurora Page

The first thing on this page is the second aurora I have ever seen - and it was visible in the UK on the 21 October 2001 between midnight and 1 am.

The first doesn't really count because it was seen in a return flight from San Francisco to London during the nighttime part of the flight over Greenland from the rearmost aircraft window. Lots of green veils and curtains changing and disappearing over the course of minutes.

For the second, I was up taking pictures of the Eastern sky around midnight and later when I just glanced up to the North and there were these multiple yellow-greenish parallel fingers rising up from the North horizon to a height of 40-50 degrees or so with a red glowing background. The fingers lasted around 15 minutes but the red glows changed in brightness, waxing and waning for the next 45 minutes.

The NASA POES auroral activity image showed the maximum activity possible : a Kp index of 10 for the period.

The corresponding activity index in the SamNet York geomagnetic Aurora monitor trace looked like this :

As you can see from the trace the observed auroral activity matched the large swing in Bz, the polar component of the earths magnetic field, seen in the dip just after midnight, and the running Kp index calculation didn't indicate anything until afterwards.

The pictures of the aurora itself are below:

The auroral bright red patches, at their peak,

diminishing

and after.

The North Eastern horizon is at bottom right, at an angle because the camera was on the equatorial camera mount used for photographing star fields and not an alt-azimuth tripod.

Other pictures I took of the sky that night were all highly contaminated by diffuse red auroral glows, all the way up to the zenith in all exposures over a minute or so long.

Like this one, taken pointing just south of due East. Hence the auroral glow must have reached the zenith!.

All pictures are taken on a Olympus OM1 on cable shutter and 90 second exposures using Kodak Royal Gold 100 and scanned using a Canon negative scanner. The last picture was 300 seconds.

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