I bundled up in the gym lobby, girding myself against the sub-freezing temperatures outside; five below, centigrade, when I walked in and undoubtedly colder now. As I stepped outside, and rounded the corner, beginning my long ambulatory trek home, I did my usual sky-survey.

I’m a little bit of an amateur astronomer; I don’t have a telescope, but I really enjoy the natural beauty of a full, unpolluted starfield. Reykjavik, like any other city, is wretchedly polluted with excess lighting, but these days we’re getting decent views of the Venusian-Lunar conjunctions. Orion’s low in the south and Ursa Major high in the north.

Today, as I looked over towards Ursa Major and then towards Polaris, I noticed a little something strange. There was this weird contrail stretching out from the northeast sky, cutting just north of the Dipper, and continuing on towards the northwest. It was a fairly diffuse contrail, but it could believably be lit by the moon or the city’s light. Then it started shifting.

Northern Lights!

I stopped dead in my tracks and watched the nascent aurora gently shimmer in the sky. There were streetlights everywhere, so I ran down the ice-slick sidewalk into a big - and unlit - gravel parking lot nearby. I had a great open view. A diffuse band, maybe a degree or so of of arc in width, but stretching all the way from northeast to northwest along the sky. It was hardly bright, which is why I’d initially thought it was some unusual kind of contrail. But, staring straight at it, the subtle rippling of the aurora belied its true nature.

This initial display was probably pretty unremarkable for the locals; few people seemed to be stopping or even taking notice of the celestial waltz happening above. I ended up quickly walking farther along my route, as halfway down it there was a long, nearly light-free path between bunch of darkened houses, with a broad and unobstructed view of the heavens.

Once I reached that spot, I stood there for a good twenty minutes. The lights had gotten more active; the iridescent curtaining was clearly visible. As I watched, a ripple - several degrees of arc in width - silently passed overhead. Sublime. The band slowly faded.

As I got farther towards home, I looked up again and was astonished to see an even more remarkable formation. The northwestern band had reappeared and seemingly split, fanning out into up to five bright, writhing green tendrils. Like a giant bird’s foot undulating in the sky.

In the end, I stumbled home, nose icicular, after a full hour of intermittent walking - a trip that normally takes twenty minutes or so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 23:01 pm and is filed under Brain Dribble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.