February 20th, 2008, brought a lunar eclipse. It was high in the sky for most of the lower 48, but here in Fairbanks the eclipse was already in full swing before the moon peeked over the eastern horizon. I drove over to campus and shot these pictures.

The main part of campus:

The Museum of the North:

This is one of many ice sculptures greeting visitors to UAF during the winter. The temperature rises above freezing so rarely that this outdoor ice art is safe and very common

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I’ve seen the aurora borealis several times since moving to Fairbanks, but nothing like this.

I routinely check the UAF Aurora Forecast at night, and right around midnight as February 29th, 2008 rolled over into March, the forecast hit a level I haven’t seen it at before: HEAVY+. I looked out my one tiny north-facing window and saw this nice green arc across the sky, despite the glow of the city lights in Fairbanks.

As the display got more intense, I went out on my driveway to watch. In the past I had seen only sluggish aurora, pretty arcs slipping across the sky faster than clouds but slower than much of anything else. I thought the rapidly shifting northern lights on TV was produced with time-lapse photography, and the real thing must be less impressive. I was wrong.

This night the lights were all across the sky, not just in the north, and were most vivid right overhead. They shifted in waves more like rippling water than sluggish clouds. They moved so fast, in fact, that my long exposures blurred out much of the detail. Next time I’ve got some new things to try with the camera.

Since that night I’ve been checking the aurora forecast a little bit obsessively.

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If you’re reading this, you probably arrived via my main website, Troutnut.com, so you’re familiar with my fly fishing photography.  This blog is for my Alaska photography, some of which isn’t directly related to fly fishing.  (If you’re coming from Troutnut.com, you’re probably objecting to that sentence on the grounds that, obviously, everything is directly related to fly fishing.  Touché.  In that case, the reason I made a separate site is, “Just because.”)

Compared to Troutnut.com, this will be more like a travel journal, and I won’t be quite as tight-lipped about locations.  I’ll include fishing reports, sightseeing trips, and random interesting things I’ve seen in Alaska.

Popularity: 20% [?]