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> Dazzling green and red light displays regularly dance across the night sky- OK I'm going to stop this right here. The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with

> Dazzling green and red light displays regularly dance across the night sky- OK I'm going to stop this right here. The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with the incredible green light displays you see in pictures. In real life, you might not even realize you are looking at a Northern Light unless you know what to look for. The only way the lights appear so vivid is by taking a photo of them with a camera with a long enough exposure. When I saw the Northern Lights I had mistaken them for bright clouds illuminated by the moonlight. Only when I took a photo with my iPhone did I realize they were the Northern Lights. The fact that I was not made aware of this until I arrived at my final destination after a journey of thousands of miles across the world has made me bitter about it. With such an inaccuracy on the very first line of this article, I can't bring myself to continue.

derekjw 8y ago
I have definitely seen skies that look just like the pictures while growing up in northern Alberta. But it's not consistent. Just showing up and expecting the sky to dazzle you on demand is not how it works, and it's a shame if it's advertised that way.
zipwitch 8y ago
As someone who grew up in Montana and North Dakota and has been an amateur astronomer from my early teens, I think you're being overly dismissive. Sure, sometimes and they're more of a faint white glow (which is pretty impressive just by itself), but in over two decades of semi-dedicated skywatching (before moving further south), I saw, with nothing but naked eyes, bright green curtains on multiple occasions, dazzling blue-white pillars all the way up to the zenith once, and red curtains twice. And that's living between 46 and 48 degrees of longitude where they're not that common. If you're setting out on a trip to specifically view the aurora borealis, you'd want to make sure you're viewing from an area with very low light pollution, make sure you stay dark adapted, and schedule your trip around solar max. Under those circumstances, and given multiple clear nights, I would expect the odds would be excellent for seeing some quite breathtaking auroras.
- gricardo99 8y ago
  Yup. Spent my childhood at 53 degrees longitude, and although you didn’t see much most of the time there were nights I went out to quickly walk the dog in the freezing cold and ended up staring up at the sky for an hour. I’ll never forget, quite a show.
- 8ytecoder 8y ago
  I think you mean latitude. (A lot of valuable information in your post and don't want this to be a distraction.)
- Jacqued 8y ago
  It's amazing that you can see them so far south in the US. I live at +48° latitude too and around here it's completely unheard of to see anything of the Northern lights (even when I used to live in the countryside at ~+50°). Thanks for the advice.
  - BenjiWiebe 8y ago
    In central Kansas, I have seen faint aurora several times in the last 10 years. Nothing bright or fast moving, but if you paid attention and looked they were definitely aurora. And my Canadian mother also confirmed it.
mskullcap 8y ago
That's nonsense. I have worked in remote northern locales for years as a geophysicist, and - the northern lights can be utterly amazing. You do not always need a long exposure camera to see them; they can be vivid, dancing and mesmerizing in reds, purples, whites and greens. Sounds like the sun wasn't active when you saw them. I have seen such incredible displays it was unnerving - with the entire sky shimmering in pockets of bright green whisps of light, and purple bands of light shining down upon me as I stood on a frozen lake on a cold, crisp night.
- supermw 8y ago
  I want to believe, but I'm skeptical. Without any actual metric to measure how amazing the lights look, you have to rely on people's subjective opinions. One person's "amazing" light show could just be faint wisps to someone else. I also think that pretty much any photo is going to look more intense that what anyone can see in real life. Look at the main photo in the article. The lights are so bright that the ground is illuminated green. Really? I doubt the lights can be such a strong light source. They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal. I could perhaps believe that under the right conditions and dark adaption a human could see the lights a bit more colorful instead of just white, but I don't see how the sky could dance with clear and crisp ribbons of green and purple for miles unless the solar activity was so strong all our electronic hardware was being fried. (A long time ago there was an event so strong the lights could be seen all the way down near the equator, luckily before we had computers)
  - kaybe 8y ago
    It's definitely green (and a little blue and red if you're lucky). You'd have to be massively colourblind to not see this. The ground though.. just like with the moon, it's still greyish, that part is usually from long exposure (so the photographs with a bright ground are suspicious indeed, same for blurred (or line!) stars). The strong lights can be moving quite fast, so they're more blurred even in pictures with low acquisition times. But again, it's hear-say as you say. Here is a more official scale for brightness: https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/polar-aurora-brightness.html https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/polar-aurora-brightness.html edit: Actually, the first picture in the article looks pretty realistic!
mixmastamyk 8y ago
Sounds like astronomy photos, always shown in super-saturated color. As compared to looking at the same thing with the naked eye, which looks close to black and white.
henrikschroder 8y ago
> The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with the incredible green light displays you see in pictures. No, the northern lights did not dazzle you that one time you saw them, and from your description it doesn't seem to have been a very spectacular occurrence that night. And from that you extrapolate that everyone else is somehow lying or exaggerating when they're describing what they saw? You do understand that they vary in strength and appearance quite a bit, right? I've only been lucky enough to see the northern lights once, and what I saw could not in any way, shape of form be mistaken for clouds. I was too far south for them to be very bright, but I'll never forget the sight of the entire sky appearing to be made out of wobbling green fire. Absolutely breathtaking.
kaybe 8y ago
Sorry you were unlucky during your trip. I've seen the sort you've described, but I can confirm what the other commenters are saying. It does look different from most pictures, but that's because they usually don't resolve the fine structure (eg all the wikipedia photos on the aurora page are a little blurred, though the real thing sometimes looks blurred as well) and you don't get a feeling for the three-dimensionality. There are almost no good videos as well. The best I've seen was as bright as.. a half- to full moon with respect to how you see the ground/ease of moving around? (Hard to judge from memory.)
chanandler_bong 8y ago
I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, for 25 years. On numerous occasions the aurora were bright enough that you could easily see to walk safely at night without a flashlight. Yes, it was a dim green glow on the ground but looking up directly at them, they were as bright as a full moon.
dotancohen 8y ago
A few years ago I spent a week in Norway (Tromso) to catch the northern lights. On our last night, we were walking with a Norwegian that was cross-country skiing in the middle of the night when the sky lit up with amazing, vibrant greens, purples, and even golds. The Norwegian even commented that he's never seem it so amazing before. For most of the week we were impressed by the beautiful, slowly flowing rivers of green in the sky, and the glowing green snow around us. But for ten minutes that night, we saw something so extraordinary that I absolutely cannot describe the sensation of seeing shapes, colours, and motions that the eyes and mind simply did not evolve to comprehend.
quietbritishjim 8y ago
My parents-in-law experienced a similar thing, and were definitively told that that's as good as it gets. ... They were on a tour where you get your money back if you don't see the lights.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
balabaster 8y ago
I was driving home from Vancouver to Kamloops one night through the coastal range to BC's interior on Highway 5 somewhere between the Coquihalla summit and Merritt - I don't recall exactly where on the road I was, possibly close to Kingsvale (Approx. 50°N). It was pitch dark when it began, no city lights and so many stars, so bright, they were endless. That stretch of highway is spectacular on a clear night. I'd recommend it to anyone. I used to drive that stretch once every couple of weeks for about a year after I moved to Canada at the end of 1999, so it would've been that winter season. I used to take the mid-afternoon Friday flight from Heathrow so I would've landed in Vancouver at around 5:30pm and by the time I got my car out of long term parking and got to that point it would have been around 9pm or so. The Aurora was so close and so vivid and bright it seemed as if it was intruding into the car, close enough to touch if you could touch it, but it's like trying to touch a rainbow, you just can't. It screws with your brain. I pulled over on the side of the highway and got out. They were vivid hues of green, pink and yellow and they were bright enough in the dark that even without the lights of my car, I could see clear detail of the landscape, brighter than if lit by a full moon, but not quite like daylight. The entire sky lit up as far as you could see with pillars of light that ebbed and waned like a symphony of light and colour. There was nothing faint or subtle about it. I could see the hairs on the back of my hand it was so bright. Even my description fails to capture its beauty. The oddest thing about having experienced that was it was so blurry, it screwed with my eyes and my brain. Not being able to focus on it was like driving in thick fog. Despite it being a magical and mesmerizing experience, I felt some discomfort. I couldn't look at it for longer than a few seconds at a time before I had to look back to the road and hillside so my eyes could focus on something.

derekjw 8y ago

I have definitely seen skies that look just like the pictures while growing up in northern Alberta. But it's not consistent. Just showing up and expecting the sky to dazzle you on demand is not how it works, and it's a shame if it's advertised that way.

zipwitch 8y ago

As someone who grew up in Montana and North Dakota and has been an amateur astronomer from my early teens, I think you're being overly dismissive. Sure, sometimes and they're more of a faint white glow (which is pretty impressive just by itself), but in over two decades of semi-dedicated skywatching (before moving further south), I saw, with nothing but naked eyes, bright green curtains on multiple occasions, dazzling blue-white pillars all the way up to the zenith once, and red curtains twice. And that's living between 46 and 48 degrees of longitude where they're not that common. If you're setting out on a trip to specifically view the aurora borealis, you'd want to make sure you're viewing from an area with very low light pollution, make sure you stay dark adapted, and schedule your trip around solar max. Under those circumstances, and given multiple clear nights, I would expect the odds would be excellent for seeing some quite breathtaking auroras.

gricardo99 8y ago
Yup. Spent my childhood at 53 degrees longitude, and although you didn’t see much most of the time there were nights I went out to quickly walk the dog in the freezing cold and ended up staring up at the sky for an hour. I’ll never forget, quite a show.
8ytecoder 8y ago
I think you mean latitude. (A lot of valuable information in your post and don't want this to be a distraction.)
Jacqued 8y ago
It's amazing that you can see them so far south in the US. I live at +48° latitude too and around here it's completely unheard of to see anything of the Northern lights (even when I used to live in the countryside at ~+50°). Thanks for the advice.
- BenjiWiebe 8y ago
  In central Kansas, I have seen faint aurora several times in the last 10 years. Nothing bright or fast moving, but if you paid attention and looked they were definitely aurora. And my Canadian mother also confirmed it.

mskullcap 8y ago

That's nonsense. I have worked in remote northern locales for years as a geophysicist, and - the northern lights can be utterly amazing. You do not always need a long exposure camera to see them; they can be vivid, dancing and mesmerizing in reds, purples, whites and greens. Sounds like the sun wasn't active when you saw them. I have seen such incredible displays it was unnerving - with the entire sky shimmering in pockets of bright green whisps of light, and purple bands of light shining down upon me as I stood on a frozen lake on a cold, crisp night.

supermw 8y ago
I want to believe, but I'm skeptical. Without any actual metric to measure how amazing the lights look, you have to rely on people's subjective opinions. One person's "amazing" light show could just be faint wisps to someone else. I also think that pretty much any photo is going to look more intense that what anyone can see in real life. Look at the main photo in the article. The lights are so bright that the ground is illuminated green. Really? I doubt the lights can be such a strong light source. They are also very sharply defined as a result of the longer exposure, a human would probably see something blurrier and more ethereal. I could perhaps believe that under the right conditions and dark adaption a human could see the lights a bit more colorful instead of just white, but I don't see how the sky could dance with clear and crisp ribbons of green and purple for miles unless the solar activity was so strong all our electronic hardware was being fried. (A long time ago there was an event so strong the lights could be seen all the way down near the equator, luckily before we had computers)
- kaybe 8y ago
  It's definitely green (and a little blue and red if you're lucky). You'd have to be massively colourblind to not see this. The ground though.. just like with the moon, it's still greyish, that part is usually from long exposure (so the photographs with a bright ground are suspicious indeed, same for blurred (or line!) stars). The strong lights can be moving quite fast, so they're more blurred even in pictures with low acquisition times. But again, it's hear-say as you say. Here is a more official scale for brightness: https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/polar-aurora-brightness.html https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/polar-aurora-brightness.html edit: Actually, the first picture in the article looks pretty realistic!

mixmastamyk 8y ago

Sounds like astronomy photos, always shown in super-saturated color. As compared to looking at the same thing with the naked eye, which looks close to black and white.

henrikschroder 8y ago

> The Northern Lights do not dazzle you with the incredible green light displays you see in pictures. No, the northern lights did not dazzle you that one time you saw them, and from your description it doesn't seem to have been a very spectacular occurrence that night. And from that you extrapolate that everyone else is somehow lying or exaggerating when they're describing what they saw? You do understand that they vary in strength and appearance quite a bit, right? I've only been lucky enough to see the northern lights once, and what I saw could not in any way, shape of form be mistaken for clouds. I was too far south for them to be very bright, but I'll never forget the sight of the entire sky appearing to be made out of wobbling green fire. Absolutely breathtaking.

kaybe 8y ago

Sorry you were unlucky during your trip. I've seen the sort you've described, but I can confirm what the other commenters are saying. It does look different from most pictures, but that's because they usually don't resolve the fine structure (eg all the wikipedia photos on the aurora page are a little blurred, though the real thing sometimes looks blurred as well) and you don't get a feeling for the three-dimensionality. There are almost no good videos as well. The best I've seen was as bright as.. a half- to full moon with respect to how you see the ground/ease of moving around? (Hard to judge from memory.)

chanandler_bong 8y ago

I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, for 25 years. On numerous occasions the aurora were bright enough that you could easily see to walk safely at night without a flashlight. Yes, it was a dim green glow on the ground but looking up directly at them, they were as bright as a full moon.

dotancohen 8y ago

A few years ago I spent a week in Norway (Tromso) to catch the northern lights. On our last night, we were walking with a Norwegian that was cross-country skiing in the middle of the night when the sky lit up with amazing, vibrant greens, purples, and even golds. The Norwegian even commented that he's never seem it so amazing before. For most of the week we were impressed by the beautiful, slowly flowing rivers of green in the sky, and the glowing green snow around us. But for ten minutes that night, we saw something so extraordinary that I absolutely cannot describe the sensation of seeing shapes, colours, and motions that the eyes and mind simply did not evolve to comprehend.

quietbritishjim 8y ago

My parents-in-law experienced a similar thing, and were definitively told that that's as good as it gets. ... They were on a tour where you get your money back if you don't see the lights.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

balabaster 8y ago

I was driving home from Vancouver to Kamloops one night through the coastal range to BC's interior on Highway 5 somewhere between the Coquihalla summit and Merritt - I don't recall exactly where on the road I was, possibly close to Kingsvale (Approx. 50°N). It was pitch dark when it began, no city lights and so many stars, so bright, they were endless. That stretch of highway is spectacular on a clear night. I'd recommend it to anyone. I used to drive that stretch once every couple of weeks for about a year after I moved to Canada at the end of 1999, so it would've been that winter season. I used to take the mid-afternoon Friday flight from Heathrow so I would've landed in Vancouver at around 5:30pm and by the time I got my car out of long term parking and got to that point it would have been around 9pm or so. The Aurora was so close and so vivid and bright it seemed as if it was intruding into the car, close enough to touch if you could touch it, but it's like trying to touch a rainbow, you just can't. It screws with your brain. I pulled over on the side of the highway and got out. They were vivid hues of green, pink and yellow and they were bright enough in the dark that even without the lights of my car, I could see clear detail of the landscape, brighter than if lit by a full moon, but not quite like daylight. The entire sky lit up as far as you could see with pillars of light that ebbed and waned like a symphony of light and colour. There was nothing faint or subtle about it. I could see the hairs on the back of my hand it was so bright. Even my description fails to capture its beauty. The oddest thing about having experienced that was it was so blurry, it screwed with my eyes and my brain. Not being able to focus on it was like driving in thick fog. Despite it being a magical and mesmerizing experience, I felt some discomfort. I couldn't look at it for longer than a few seconds at a time before I had to look back to the road and hillside so my eyes could focus on something.