Lucky so-and-so
Posted on July 11th, 2007 by Jackie Danicki
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Originally uploaded by dsearls.
Doc Searls not only finagled a window seat upgrade into business class for his flight from San Francisco to London, but got to see (and photograph) the Aurora Borealis along the way! I am so excited by this, and it didn’t even happen to me! What beautiful photos.
Filed under: Life
I have had this experience, too, although not from business class, and I didn’t get any photos as good as this. It was utterly spectacular, none the less.
Sometimes you need to know what to look for. In winter flights between Europe and the U.S. — especially the Western U.S. — it is common to see auroras outside the windows, especally on the north side of the plane. The auroras are a halo of light, shaped like a giant circular curtain, or set of curtains, surronding the north and south magnetic poles. Srong solar winds, which also excite the auroras, push the halo away from the sun, so it can sag far down, sometimes even over the U.S. In October of ‘04 it ran from the Dakotas, across Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, in a band several hundred miles wide, and about a thousand miles high. I was photographed as far south as Texas and San Diego. But auroras are not always bright. Note from the photos that stars shone through the aurora I shot. Those were all time exposures, so they appear a bit brigher than they were in reality. As I said in the post, it was easy for the eye to read them as clouds at first. Even many window-sitters don’t know what they’re seeing. Worse, the airlines discourage keeping windows open, so movie watchers won’t be bothered by stray light. I think that’s a complete reversal of priorities, but it’s pro forma with those folks. As a result, few see most of the spectacles — both on the ground and above it — visible outside plane windows.