Re: Auroras

[bercov@xxxxxxxxxx (John Bercovitz)]

Last time I saw one was in ~'58 but my memory of them is pretty strong.
First off, there are lots of varieties and they can all happen on the
same night.  Primarily I've seen streamers which are fairly bright
and curtains which are fairly dim.  The phenomenon seems to have a 
sort of stop/start nature to it.  It moves around a bit and hangs for
a while with only minor detail moving and then it moves radically again.
You're going to need a heck of a stereobase.  The objects are very 
large.  I don't know if there is a film fast enough that isn't so 
coarse-grained that you would lose too much detail.  Does Kodak or 
someone make a fast high res color CCD?  I think streamers should be
fairly easy to image with film.  I remember it taking quite a bit of
time (45 min?) for the eyes to dark adapt enough to even see anything,
if that's a clue to their brightness.  Well, I guess you could see
_something_ in 15 minutes and all you were going to see in 45.

John B


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