 Ref: 7402 Waiting for something to happen. Orion struggles to appear through broken cloud while the aurora chasers keep watch for something that looks like the Aurora Borealis. A faint horizontal band caused some speculation but this appears to have been nothing more than thin cloud. |
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 Ref: 7406 The appearance of the green curtain, was greatly welcomed by all of the observed who had braved the cold snow covered mountain behind the cable car station. |
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 Ref: 7409 Another view of the green curtain. This particular feature was relatively short lived. |
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 Ref: 7412 A blend of colours. The long exposure of the camera used to take the above picture brings out the green colour of the Aurora. It has also captured the reflection of the orange sodium lights of Tromso on the nearby clouds. The blue colouration of the sky, especially noticable to the right of the image, is due to moonlight. As is the case during the day, light from the Sun enters the atmosphere and the blue component gets scattered making the sky blue. Moonlight is nothing more than sunlight hitting the Moon and being reflected back to Earth. A similar scattering of the blue component occurs with this light too, but as the intensity is much less than that coming directly from the Sun, to the human eye the sky looks dark grey or possibly dark blue. |
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 Ref: 7413 A band of auroral green was seen heading up from the green curtain, almost following the tail of the Great Bear (Ursa Major). Although it wasn't visible with the naked eye, there is evidence in the later photographs taken, that there were regions of red aurorae amongst the clouds. This is indicative of a weak display, something that was backed up by the fact that most of the activity appeared to the north of the overhead point (zenith). The auroral oval on this particular night was smaller than its average statistical size, meaning that from Tromso, the display would have been confined to the north - a region of sky sadly covered with cloud for most of the time. |
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