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but she's a girl...: BSAG » Aurora photography

Jonathan_Briggs · 11 months ago

So you're not Joanna Lumley in real life after all.
bsag · 11 months ago

Unfortunately, no.

Wait, what has Joanna Lumley got to do with auroras? (aurorae?)
Jonathan_Briggs · 11 months ago

She recently did a programme for the BBC in which she made her dream trip to see the Aurora.
bsag · 11 months ago

Ah, I see!
JulesLt · 11 months ago

Package tours seem to be remarkably expensive, but with a bit of searching on the internet, getting flights and a hotel in Tromsø is not too bad, and you have a 50% chance on any night from about mid-October.

We got lucky on the first night with a small display, but nothing on the other 2 nights, even though the skies were clear. You get the fun of walking round in lots of snow anyway . . .

(What's amazing is that the internal flight from Oslo to Tromso takes 2 hours and is near enough straight North).
bsag · 11 months ago

Sounds brilliant. I've never been to Scandinavia, but I'd love to.
Andy · 11 months ago

Wait a few years. As solar activity (sunspots) increases so will the aurorae. Then you just need to find a place with a forecast for clear skies and go in winter for long nights.
bsag · 11 months ago

Solar activity is pretty cyclical isn't it? Do you happen to know (or know of somewhere that I can look it up) what phase we're in at the moment?
Paul Mison · 11 months ago

Spaceweather is probably the best place to watch. As for the phase, the last maxima was in 2001, and the next peak is in 2012; it's an 11 year cycle. Forecasting the strength of a cycle is pretty hard; we've only observed a few full cycles with decent exo-atmospheric methods and only something like 20 with anything resembling modern science, so there's not much to go on. Graphs like the one on

bsag · 11 months ago

Oh wow. Getting a mixture of colours would be brilliant.

Martin Polley · 11 months ago

I've heard that Churchill, Manitoba is the place where you're most likely to see the aurora. And polar bears, too.

bsag · 11 months ago

I'd like to see polar bears too, so that would kill two birds with one stone. Metaphorically, of course, I don't condone bird killing :-)

Paul Mison · 11 months ago

Oops, cut off for some reason. Maybe I broke my HTML. I was going to say: Graphs like the one on this NASA solar cycle prediction page have large variations.
bsag · 10 months ago

Thanks - SpaceWeather is wonderful. When I visited just now, there was a big headline at the top "FIREBALL ALERT". Woah!