I guess that the curved white lines in the sky are mosquito paths lit up by the aurora.
Marked inter-galactic traffic lanes.
Very well trained mosquitos in Alaska or perhaps it’s something to do with the magnetic field up there?
Time lapse photography is the culprit, I’m afraid, although inter-galactic traffic lanes is appealing. Can anyone calculate the exposure time based on the arc lengths of the stars?
The photographer gives the lapse time on his flickr page: 2h 16m. Which makes the arcs 34 degrees = 136 min * (1 day / 1440 min) * (360 degs / 1 day).
I’ve noticed the same effect as my Honda approaches the speed of light on my way to market on dark night, star-bow I think.
Interesting photo, but I don’t really like the long time-lapse because the aurora becomes just a big blur, like a green cloud. You lose the definition, and the motion. Video would be nice for people who haven’t seen an aurora for real.
so ya don’t like those fuzzy waterfall shots either?
I didn’t realize that the photographer gave the actual exposure time of the photo. But suppose you didn’t know what it was, just by looking at the individual star arcs in the photo, without any fancy measurements you can estimate that the angles are somewhere near 30 degrees. There are 12 of these pie shaped pieces in the 360 degree pie in the sky. 24 hours/ day divided by 12 pie shaped pieces/day = approximately 2 hours exposure time.
oh
My mother used to say “A good guess is better than a bad measure”.
Thanks for the fudge, but I was thinking about pie, not just pie in the sky when I die. That’s a lie.
I want a 30 degree slice of coconut cream pie now.
arc now, don’t be such a radian 
It’s a pretty picture, but it doesn’t show what the northern lights look like. It’s like those long-exposure photos of a stream or waterfall where the water ends up looking like fluffy cotton clouds flowing along the ground. It doesn’t capture what you see looking at a flowing stream.
