We had an azure sky all day. Guess what is happening now? :(

Last night one of our local 11 PM news shows had the weather guy saying we had a Northern Lights display going on, so I got myself out of bed and down the stairs to find a perfectly clear black sky with stars all around, but no Northern Lights. So maybe it comes and goes. Charlotte is pretty far south for this to occur (just north of the NC/SC border).

From my time doing astronomy, I've come to believe that if the sky in the day is completely clear, not a cloud in sight, then you stand a good chance of having clouds come in shortly after sunset, and if you have a beautiful, sunny day with big fluffy white clouds, then there's a good chance that the sky will clear up at night. Of course, those are not hard and fast rules. There are days where you have clear day and night, and more common is complete overcast day and night (like today).

I wrote a post about it at 11:13PM on Pelican.
It had mostly stopped by then.
~9:40PM to ~11PM is when it was kickin.

I went a few miles from nowhere and noticed something odd.
I was standing alongside a set of rural power lines.
All of a sudden I heard a odd clicking noise from them.
Very rhythmic and like a drummer doing a double stroke roll on 1 and 3, and a green glow emerged in the sky.
I bopped my head keeping time with it, enjoying the beat.
The clicking ended and the glow faded away.
Later the noise came back and repeated in varying intensities and slightly different rhythms, the last being a steady-ish single stroke roll.






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If your close enough to the northern lights you can whistle at them and they just go crazy, they move around and it gets brighter, I've heard that the whistling draws them closer so I don't know if its the response of the lights to the whistling or them moving closer but it does get a bit brighter.

I know it sounds like a story but it works, I whistle at the lights everytime I see them and it's worked hundreds of times

Tried to go see them last night; took a drive to a local viewpoint out of town and found a few hundred people had done the same. No place to park, found another place, waited, no lights.

Your dispensaries must be better than the ones here. :D




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Friday night was pretty great here, 11 to midnight were the most intense.
I was up on our roof but I did not try whistling-

Straight up had the best light changing and undulating effects.

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Saturday night I was better prepared, had a thin foam mat and more camera gear.
Nothing but clear star filled skies. The Aurora was fickle and not in the mood for an encore.

I planned a trip out to the Alvord desert in Oregon to do some deep sky imaging with my telescope. The aurora was so bright it killed the idea of that. So, break out the camera and tripod for some astro-landscapes!

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