Eighty-eight below
May 2, 2013 5:45 AM   Subscribe

"This is video of an aurora australis taken at the geographic south pole! I'm not absolutely sure, but it might actually be the first true video of an aurora australis here, as opposed to a timelapse of longer exposures. Sorry about the swearing - if you were there seeing it you'd probably swear too."
posted by showbiz_liz (15 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sounds like one of the guys has a mouth full of biscuits.
posted by popcassady at 5:51 AM on May 2, 2013


Dude, it's 85 below (mentioned in the video)...your face would be covered too!

This is pretty awesome.
posted by notsnot at 5:54 AM on May 2, 2013


Dude, it's 85 below (mentioned in the video)...your face would be covered too!

I prefer to believe that it's biscuits.
posted by popcassady at 5:57 AM on May 2, 2013 [7 favorites]


I assumed the 88 below in the title referred to degrees below the equator.

Agree with the awesomeness. I need to get far enough north or south to see the the aurora in person someday.
posted by TedW at 6:12 AM on May 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


Agree with the awesomeness. I need to get far enough north or south to see the the aurora in person someday.

You really do. It's amazing. Especially when it's a really great show and the reds and blues and ambers come out instead of the typical green.

You can see the aurora pretty far south sometimes, if conditions are right and it's dark enough - but that's not the same as lying on your back and watching the whole sky explode in color and light.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:16 AM on May 2, 2013


Oh, wow. Just yesterday I was looking at a photograph of the aurora borealis in the old Time-Life book of unexplained mysteries we have sitting around in the bathroom, and inspired by it to talk with my roommates about how we'd all love to get a chance to see it in real life some day (and we are far too far south to ever see it... I've heard that occasionally you can manage to see it as far south as the 35th parallel, but we're in Texas, south of that). Seeing video is already a much different experience than looking at still images, seeing it in real life would be immense.
posted by titus n. owl at 6:21 AM on May 2, 2013


Very pleased that it's a real-time video. So many aurora videos are timelapsed, with no indication of what timespan's involved, but the real thing in real time is, I think, more awe-inspiring.

Only seen the aurora once, and that was from the cheap seats in the back of a Virgin 747 over Baffin Bay so far from ideal. Spectacular doesn't even pretend to describe them - huge shifting elegant curtains of almost-white light that are clearly and disturbingly far too huge to be moving like that. I've spent some time in the north of Scotland and had a few cases when the auroral alert app on my phone has gone off, but so far no luck...
posted by Devonian at 6:24 AM on May 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


I look at that and my right brain says "beautiful" and my left brain says "well that there's a nice serving of hot death on a plate" because objectively it's a sleet of heavy particles and radiation being eaten up by our lovely lovely atmosphere.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:42 AM on May 2, 2013 [3 favorites]


I read the start of the third sentence as "Sorry for the sweating". Boy was I confused.
posted by notme at 6:52 AM on May 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


the auroral alert app on my phone has gone off

O.K., so we are living in a Sci Fi future.
posted by yoink at 7:19 AM on May 2, 2013 [2 favorites]


I've since seen the northern lights many times from various places around Canada, but I'll never forget when I was 7 and staying in a hut on Hluhluwe game reserve in Natal, South Africa, and my dad woke my sister and I up to see the southern lights. Who knows how it happened, but latitudinally this would be like seeing the northern lights from (checks map).... Tampa or Miami.
The colours - pinks and greens - were more vivid than any I've seen since, and as I'd just that night started reading a book of ghost stories, in my mind the aurora was part of the supernatural world.
posted by Flashman at 8:17 AM on May 2, 2013


Climate of Antarctica. It's not 88 C degrees below 0 since the coldest ever recorded is 89 C degrees below. It is likely 88 F below zero since the mean average temp is 70 F below.
posted by stbalbach at 8:19 AM on May 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


It is so hard to describe to another person what viewing an aurora is like. The colors have an odd presence to them--I've seen blues that were indescribable, reds that glowed like nothing else I've ever beheld, one moment transparent with stars shining through and the next brilliant to the point of blotting them out. There's something about the scale, the speed with which things change, and that astonishing glow that I find completely overwhelming.

One night on a long drive back from a camping trip I noticed a glow in the sky that would normally have been taken for a distant city, only there was no city. The glow grew and spread across the sky, and I had to pull over next to a cornfield so I could get out and gape, tears flowing down my face, alternately laughing and weeping, until it just as suddenly dissolved into a normally black sky full of stars. Took me a while to get back in the car again.

There is nothing, really nothing quite like it.
posted by kinnakeet at 8:27 AM on May 2, 2013 [5 favorites]


Dude, it's 85 below (mentioned in the video)...your face would be covered too!

I prefer to believe that it's biscuits.


Perhaps he covered his face in still-warm biscuits.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:52 AM on May 2, 2013


I've seen the Aurora borealis up in SE Wisconsin from time to time. I seem to catch it every few years. Usually, it's faint and distant and the normal green. But I remember one year it was as if the sky was burning red with flame that jumped and danced across the sky. And unlike other times, it was the whole freaking sky, not just in the distance when you looked north. It was everywhere.

Come to think of it, it has been a number of years since I've seen the Aurora. I need to look up more.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:19 AM on May 2, 2013


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