StarWatch Astronomy

StarWatch 1474 for the week of November 17, 2024

"They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot"

Peter Detterline posed a question during our trip to Iceland. "If you lived here, with the northern lights visible every clear night, would you get tired of them?" My answer was a definitive "yes." Too much of anything seems to numb the soul for more of the same. However, three great nights of aurora watching have not been nearly enough to dampen my enthusiasm for wanting to see more. * I remember teaching an Allen student who had moved to the Lehigh Valley from Alaska. He told me his mother, who enjoyed photographing the northern lights, was distraught over her decision to discard boxes of auroral photos when she chose to live in Pennsylvania. According to the student, she thought that she would simply take up her hobby in a new location. * "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," according to "Big Yellow Taxi," a song recorded by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell in 1970. Iceland will have several more years of active auroral displays before conditions quiet down as the sun approaches solar minimum in the early 2030s. * Aurora night two occurred during our fifth and last evening in our Arnarstapi rental home. It was less spectacular than our first encounter, yet nonetheless still captivating. I spent a good chunk of it trying to stay balanced in an 8000-year-old lava field, tamed by a thick carpet of soft, spongy moss that was an iridescent green by day. In the immediate foreground about one mile distant, was the local volcano, 1727-foot Stapafell. When the aurora brightened, cloud-draped Snaefellsjokull, the volcano Jules Verne used to transport his fictional characters to Earth's center, was visible five miles away. On this night, the display was more curtain-like, with at times, vivid green furls waving slowly back and forth like a flag in a gentle summer breeze. I also had a better look at the sky with Polaris displaced to a staggering 65-degree altitude, almost too high to maintain one's steadiness in the irregular lava field terrain. Orion rose glacially over the Atlantic around 11 p.m., its belt reaching an altitude of only 25 degrees by my 2 a.m. bedtime. * Our last full day in Iceland was spent slowly making our way to our next lodging, Bru Country Estate, near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where we had started our Icelandic journey just one week earlier. Among at least a half dozen stops for photography, we discovered Lake Apavatn with plenty of shoreline room available for late-night astrophotography. * We settled into our room and participated in a sumptuous dinner buffet that included lamb and mushroom soup, two foods I don't particularly like, but were finely prepared and consumed with enthusiasm. After dinner, we then got our gear together, suited up in warmer clothing, and drove back to the lake. * Oh my goodness, it was filled with dozens of auroral tour vans and perhaps a hundred people milling about with distracting flashlights in a muffled carnival-type atmosphere. I assembled my camera and tripod in the dark, accidentally flipping the tripod over with the camera and lens attached when I gathered the strap attached to its storage case. I can still see it happening in slow motion, falling backward to the macadamed parking lot. Somehow, the camera body survived its hard impact with minimal scars, but the lens did not. It has been repaired since my return. * I photographed the sky on night three exclusively with my fisheye lens among a decreasing number of enthusiasts during the next few hours. By midnight, Pete and I were alone, with the wavering green and red lights of the north reflecting off the choppy waters of the wind-scoured lake. * It was homeward bound the following afternoon across a cloudless Greenland, landing in Newark around 7 p.m. Iceland is certainly a country worthy of another visit. Ad Astra!

Gary A. Becker – [email protected] or [email protected]

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