Cold, Dark

WTF, right? They're called light pillars, because they look like pillars made of light, which is exactly what they are. The cause is flat crystals of ice floating in the air. If the air is still enough, the crystals float with their flat sides down, and a bunch of them together is effectively a big mirror. So light shining upwards gets reflected back down to your eyeball, and you see light that appears to come from up in the air.

So basically, any light source which leaks a significant amount of light up into the sky can develop a rod of light above it, which is the same color as the light on the ground. What I find interesting is the different color rods seem to happen at different heights - I don't know if that's a coincidence or not.

Usually this happens when it gets really cold and the air is full of 'diamond dust' ice. So yeah, it's cold out there! Winter happened. The days are getting short (today's sunset was at 3:30 in the afternoon) and word of mouth is that it reached -60ºF at Chena Hot Springs last night. Evidence of the cold is even making its way inside my little cabin:

That's the frost accumulation at the corner of my window (inside!). It's also creeping in along the edges of the door, particularly on the metal latch and hinges:

Must be all cold and lifeless outside, right? Not so! The redpolls started showing up at my feeder about a week ago, and now rival the chickadees in numbers:

Despite being barely 5 inches long and weighing less than half an ounce, the hardy little guys don't fly south for the winter, preferring to stick it out right here.

The male Hairy Woodpecker is still around too! At the northern edge of their range, some of them fly south for winter. I haven't seen this guy for at least a month and assumed he'd done so, but he showed up the other day. No word on whether the female and youngster are still here:

The Gray Jays rummage around and occasionally pull surprising things out of the snow, like tater tots:

If they can deal with it, what's your excuse?

Birds: Sharp-shinned Hawk

Sharp-shinned Hawk, a small woodland hawk and a skillful flyer, weaving through thick forests to snatch smaller birds right off their perches.

Alaska bird checklist: 34/489

October 24 Aurora

I took this on Monday, when a coronal mass ejection (CME) collided with the Earth's magnetic field. This, in itself, is not out of the ordinary. What is abnormal is for the effects to be seen so far down south. The resulting geomagnetic storm had auroras visible from Arkansas - I had a friend in my hometown call and ask 'Why's the sky red like that?' I, of course, had no clue what he was talking about, and suggested dust or thin clouds lit up by the sunset. :P

From Ontario, it looked like this:

Source

Ozark, AR had yet another view:

Source

It was big news, since this was a brand new experience for most people down there - I must admit, I flipped shit myself when I saw my first aurora last September, and it can still stop me in my tracks, even after seeing countless more.

But those of you who saw it, or even just saw pictures, may be wondering: why didn't it look like the auroras you see in the pictures I take? Well, for one, you're looking at it out on the horizon. Being lucky enough to live under the auroral oval means they're much higher in the sky for me, and consequently much closer. There are advantages to having your aurora overhead*. One is that it's easier to tell the structure - imagine trying to figure out the folds in a curtain from the side compared to looking up from the bottom. Another advantage is that your line-of-sight through the aurora is longer (optical path length) and so the aurora appears brighter.

[*Actually, what matters in both of these cases is not necessarily having the aurora 'up' so much as having it near the magnetic zenith; but for those of us living in the far north, that roughly corresponds to overhead.]

Perhaps more importantly, strong magnetic storms (required to bring aurorae that far south) tend to have auroras dominated by high-altitude reds, which are in a thinner part of the atmosphere - consequently, the aurora produced looks thinner. More normal levels of magnetic activity tends to produce auroras dominated by a lower-altitude green. These occur in a much lower and denser part of the atmosphere, which makes them look more substantial and structured. For example, this timelapse I filmed a few weeks ago:

Compare to this timelapse shot from Ozark, AR on the 24th:

Which is a roundabout way to saying: All aurora sightings are not equal, there are a variety of colors, shapes, and motions for us to explore.

Snow

It stays below freezing most of the time now, and the snow has arrived. At first, only a few intrepid pioneers wafted down to stake their claims among the fallen leaves.

Soon the white invaders were arriving in earnest.

After that, it didn't take long for everything to be draped in white.

The first snow brings a sense of inevitability - it's coming. But there is an excitement carried along with that, with a tinge of danger that makes it all the more intoxicating. People from outside often wonder why someone would want to live in a place where it can go for 2 months without ever rising above 0ºF. Why don't you come see for yourself? It's mostly indescribable. Already there are hints of the special beauty this place has in winter - the mirages on the mountains, the pillars and halos around the sun and moon, the crisp night skies, the light gradients and soft colors you only notice when all other colors are gone. A month from now, those hardy enough to brave the temperatures will be rewarded with a world reduced to fluffy white outlines, delicate fractals of ice hanging anywhere moisture is present, and sunrises that merge with sunsets to create a single four-hour long spectacle of shadow and light.

Yeah, yeah; so it gets cold. To surrender all this because wearing gloves and a coat is too inconvenient? Madness...