Chris Peterson wrote:NoelC wrote:As one who has never personally seen this phenomenon, I can only say I would be dumbstruck if I were to look up and see something like that. It would be especially disconcerting that it seems to be centered on a position straight up from the observer's viewpoint.
Keep in mind that this is a photographic view: brightness and especially color saturation are enhanced over a visual view. That may not be as obvious with the aurora, which many people don't have much practical familiarity with, but should be apparent with the light-pollution illuminated clouds, which most people see all the time.
rstevenson wrote:NoelC wrote:As one who has never personally seen this phenomenon, I can only say I would be dumbstruck if I were to look up and see something like that.
That was my reaction the first time I saw a really good aurora, while I was visiting Dawson City in the Yukon. I stood there staring up, slack-jawed, for a good 30 minutes until my neck protested mightily. Luckily it was winter so my mouth didn't fill with insects.
noctiluca wrote:When it comes to the colour in the picture, I actually had to go down quite a bit on saturation to get the colours correct, normally we see mostly "oxygen-green" auroras, but during this storm the purple and red hues were dominating (and the colours in the picture is close to what could be seen with the naked eye). The coronas moved so quickly I couldn`t believe my eyes - normally time-lapse sequences and the like are a bit unrealistically speeded up, but for this display even the most up-speeded video sequences I have seen doesn`t do it justice.., it has to be seen to be believed and no pictures or words can really describe it.
I wish clear and dark skies to all of you, who knows how far south the next CME might be seen !?
Kind regards, Fredrik Broms
I've seen one grand coronal aurora here in Washington, and I witnessed an extremely dynamic phenomena that I've never heard of or seen documented before.
In Nov 2004, my excitement escalated quickly when I saw web-site auroral activity was
very high, AND I new the sky was clear, AND it was near midnight. A perfect storm! I went ouside and looked up only to first be disappointed by a large area of cloud-covered sky, lit up I thought by Seattle!! But then as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I was amazed to see a huge aurora at my zenith, rays dancing about and merging, all converging to a (vanashing) point overhead. This was amazing. Visual colors were not apparent at first, but just as the POD shows redish and purplish patches, I did see those colors by eye in a small region lower in the sky. This aurora was long lasting, I'm guessing an hour. But that jaw-dropping behavior I saw I can only describe as annulus waves light, centered on the vanishing point, that propagated toward or away (I can't remember) from this point at maybe 5 times per second over the whole auroral display! The width of these annulus (donut) waves were several degrees at most. I've seen auroal pillars come and go, dancing rays, and lovely curtains waving like a flag in the wind, all at on time scales of 10's of seconds to minutes, but I've never seen these bright, concentric waves of light propagating over 45°radius in 1/10 sec or so, and repetitively at 5Hz!
I'm certainly interested if anyone has seen this or other less common aroral behavior.