Just got back from our local town farm. Standing out the blacksmith shop (mandatory metal content), the whole sky is a rosy red with wide streamers headed toward the south. Best I've seen since my childhood in Maine.
Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH
I was in Quebec in the spring and saw the best in 25+ years. We were on a sand peninsula jutting 100' into a huge lake. The one night we didn't have aurora, the water was so calm that an insect would have created tsunamis. Standing at the water's edge I couldn't tell where the sky stopped and the lake began, the stars reflected in the water so perfectly that I was standing on the edge of the universe and feeling extreme vertigo.
Yeah, that was something. Red, with white stripes, now and again.
Jim
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The wierdest one I saw was "man made". It was in '62 and I was playing boy scientist on Johnston Island measuring ion and electron densities in the upper atmosphere during the next to last round of US above ground nuke tests. I remember it well, because it occurred at the same time as the "Cuban Missile Crisis", and we were stuck on "this f**king island", wondering what awful things might happen to our wives and kids if Kennedy and Kruschev couldn't cool it off.
Immediately following one of the high altitude shots (IIRC it was code named "Starfish") the whole sky turned an eiry green with dark striations in it, from horizon to horizon. We were over a thousand miles away from Hawaii, but the Honolulu papers reported seeing the effect that night.
The sky was bright enough to read a newspaper by and took over an hour to dim down.
I hope that none of us nor our collective decendants never get to see one of those again.
I've got some text and photos of the instrumentation stuff we were working with back then up at:
Jeff
I'm not sure if this fits your time line, but I was on the USS Norton Sound when the last Polaris live warhead was shot off from a submarine. We had a whole flotilla surrounding the sub when it fired one off from under water. The whole ship was battened down, but I sneaked a peek through a porthole during the launch. The missile came out of the water and traveled down range to ??? We had a bunch of civilians and equipment on board, perhaps in case there was a mishap. I think that was the very last above ground/water nuclear test.
Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH Ex Missile Technician - GS2
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