Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsThose of you who went to Tuckahoe on Friday night and stayed indoors to watch the NASCAR night race at Richmond on Saturday missed a spectacle at least as exciting. Sometime just after nine PM we were granted witness to the brightest and most intense display of auroras that I've seen. It began with a brilliant green dome of light above the Tuckahoe trees below and west of Polaris. After just a few minutes, the glow grew spikes of greenish-white light that became at times tall and bright enough to resemble the searchlight displays that car dealers love to use. At their brightest there were no stars visible anywhere in the columns of light -- the intense electrical display completely overcame them. The columns easily reached past Polaris, maybe 45 degrees tall, and then the whole northwestern sky became suffused with a red glow the color of thin wine. The display flowed and flickered, sometimes smooth, sometimes spiked like a punker's hair. Everyone oohed and aahed except Don, who was headfirst into his trailer, frantically trying to dig out cameras and tripods. After fifteen minutes or so the auroral display had drifted west past Ursa Major and faded almost completely. Most of us thought it was over, and had wandered back to our telescopes, when another green dome appeared above the Tuckahoe trees. This one was just east of Polaris, and the spikes that soon appeared were taller than the earlier ones, though not nearly as intense. We were able to follow one bright beam of gray-green light up beside the western edge of the Milky Way until it passed Cassiopeia and faded out at least 60 degrees above the horizon. After a few minutes this display too became a pale curtain of red light and drifted west, dimming as it reached the Big Dipper, and then disappearing. We had seen two, fifteen-minute *fantastic* displays of Northern Lights in a total time of about 40 minutes. We all waited hopefully for a third, but this had been the last brilliant display of the night. An hour or so later I left for home. Oh yes, I did look at some Messier objects last night, too. I can't remember what they were. Steve Long |