Home/BlogFamed Arctic and aurora photographer Ole C Salomonsen has reported in the last hour strange lights over Tromso, Norway. Ole says the sight is the “weirdest stuff I’ve seen”.
I’ve taken the liberty of increasing the brightness of two of the images he posted:
I can’t imagine what this is, but I suspect it’s related to some sort of rocket-borne experiment. But the spatial distribution of the lights is very strange. I assume Ole will update us with time lapse photography in the near future.
UPDATE: Frank Olsen, also in Norway, posted the following photo, and said that this was indeed rocket-borne experiments containing special chemicals:
http://spaceref.com/space-weather-2/sounding-rocket-mission-will-trace-auroral-winds.html?fbclid=IwAR3kv6Zyo04h_rlxloKdp-a-0lRgxCbb6uyU8DZZGSOkXNtUCGjZmLy2yJU
Aurora Sounding
“Rocket-borne experiments containing special chemicals.” Sounds ominous.
I’m not saying it’s aliens, but it is aliens. 😉
Cool! That’s my home town. At 69 40’N. Didn’t see these particular lights myself last night, but did see auroras – Tromso is one of the northern light hot spots of the world, after all.
Here’s how the Andoya Space Center (located in Northern Norway, in a direct line about 120 km WSW of Tromso) dryly explained the event on their facebook page, 6h ago:
https://www.facebook.com/andoyaspacecenter/
In the end, a spectacular case with a sadly unremarkable resolution …
Troms and hot in the same sentence. Global warming not so far yet. Will need a ten degree warming before we call Troms briefly hot. 🙂
Tromso is missing its Norwegian letter, sorry.
I love it when I type : ) I get 🙂 and when I type ; – ) I get 😉
It appears something reformats a smiley as an utf emoji, but then the web page declares the utf bytes as latin-8859-1. Lovely. I so long for the times when o + / was just a font level thingy and Americans hadn’t yet totally messed up the European letters.
For Christ’s sake, there is no effing localized computer program that would work flawlessly. Letters break, translations suck, and internationalizations fail to take account the properties of European languages, let alone the 6000 languages of the world.
I’d accept it from small companies, but MS and Google both really ef up localizations. Apple is mostly OK, though pretty annoying sometimes – you can translate the system so efficiently it becomes impossible google for help. Or translate programming language. Syntax error if your locale is wrong. And oh boy when you import data and your locale disagrees about the decimal point (yeah didn’t parse, expected comma).
Wert,
Did you miss your meds?
I remember when our phones reached an operator, who would plug us into the phone number we wanted. We had a multi-party line and about once each week I would run to a house 3 doors down and call out to the person inside to hang her phone up. Those were the good old days.
True, those were the days I miss. A typewriter with scandic letters and a pulse dial phone in a network with automatic routers.
No effing UTF-8. Seven bit, parity none.
Just curious Kristian, do you have any relation with the oil/gas industry?
Snort.
Sure, people who write here don’t do solar, because they’re done in China. Oh, it could be also Tromso/ is a bit dim for PV.
Yes, you need solar tracking there, it’s very difficult:
https://tinyurl.com/y2aauwn6
“A sun-tracking rig in the coastal city Narvik, north of the Polar Circle, gets nearly as much sun as a fixed one in the south of Germany.”
Plenty of wind, wave, and tidal potential though,
but nothing beats hydro power.
CCS technology underway:
https://tinyurl.com/y4keg92g
https://vimeo.com/328823267?fbclid=IwAR3tbEmzeGOtZ4c2sNI7_YFmv4TM-NxoT8M2hNQP4p5PMR_BP_Nao9edm0A
The six sided symmetry suggests ice crystals.
Ice cubes?
Check out Spaceweather.com for Monday, Apr 8 (already posted, though it is still Apr 7 here) for more info. It says the clouds are “trimethyl aluminum and a barium/strontium mixture to visually track the flow of neutral and charged particles” in the ionosphere.
Back in about 1974 or 1975, from a vantage point in Flemington, NJ, I was fortunate to see a roughly linear array of similar expanding blue clouds produced by a rocket launch from Wallops Island. I took a picture, a color slide I think, but I have no idea how to post it on the web. There were other photos of the event that were published at that time. That was only one of a series of similar launches that were occurring in that era.
Hopefully, you will update with time-lapse photography in the near future.