Songs of Experience
Robin commented as we were heading back home that I didn't take nearly as many pictures of this as she thought I would. And the thing about this is that I knew even as I was taking these pictures that anything I got would only be an approximation of what I saw. It's a sort of visual Cliff's Notes summary of the aurora, a surface retelling without the depth of the experience. But that's kind of the thing about the northern lights. You can find some really good pictures of this night's aurora on the internet right now, taken with far better equipment by far more talented photographers. But that's still just a hint of it.
Part of what the pictures don't get is the motion, because the aurora is almost like a living, breathing thing. It's not static. It moves across the sky ... fast. The curtains of light danced across the horizon, moving mostly from right to left, drifting hundreds of miles in just a few seconds. At one point, a swirl of it spun off right above our heads, curling above us in a vortex I was too slow to capture with the camera ... partly because I was transfixed by the sight.
When we first got out of the car at this second spot, the lights were pulsating. Ripples of light were moving across it, travelling upward from the horizon along the pillars to a point far above us. The waves of it pulsed across a hundred miles in something far less than a second, and you got a visual hint of what the speed of light looks like.
It was overwhelming, really, and I mostly just stood back and watched it, enjoying the moment and taking whatever I could into my brain. I clicked the shutter here and there and ultimately took about 40 pictures. Which was probably enough. I don't think I'd have gotten more if I took 500 shots.
Songs of Experience
Robin commented as we were heading back home that I didn't take nearly as many pictures of this as she thought I would. And the thing about this is that I knew even as I was taking these pictures that anything I got would only be an approximation of what I saw. It's a sort of visual Cliff's Notes summary of the aurora, a surface retelling without the depth of the experience. But that's kind of the thing about the northern lights. You can find some really good pictures of this night's aurora on the internet right now, taken with far better equipment by far more talented photographers. But that's still just a hint of it.
Part of what the pictures don't get is the motion, because the aurora is almost like a living, breathing thing. It's not static. It moves across the sky ... fast. The curtains of light danced across the horizon, moving mostly from right to left, drifting hundreds of miles in just a few seconds. At one point, a swirl of it spun off right above our heads, curling above us in a vortex I was too slow to capture with the camera ... partly because I was transfixed by the sight.
When we first got out of the car at this second spot, the lights were pulsating. Ripples of light were moving across it, travelling upward from the horizon along the pillars to a point far above us. The waves of it pulsed across a hundred miles in something far less than a second, and you got a visual hint of what the speed of light looks like.
It was overwhelming, really, and I mostly just stood back and watched it, enjoying the moment and taking whatever I could into my brain. I clicked the shutter here and there and ultimately took about 40 pictures. Which was probably enough. I don't think I'd have gotten more if I took 500 shots.