"The Northern Lights have seen queer sites, but the queerest they ever did see,
Was Dave on afloat on a great big boat, playing with his pho-tog-raphy!" (My apologies to Robert Service)

This isn't the greatest photo and it shows the problem of using non-SLR digital cameras (digicams) with high ISOs with time exposures - there is too much "noise." But it's probably somewhat of an unusual photograph, since it shows the Northern Lights from the deck of the Sun Princess cruise ship, which was traveling through the Inland Passage in Alaska.

I doubt anyone else was up and outside to view and/or make the photograph of this strange and somewhat ghostly show. For one thing, most people think of the Northern Lights as a winter phenomenon, and so wouldn't bother to look for them on a sumer night. And it was after midnight - most people were asleep or partying inside the ship.

But I knew to look for the Lights because I had camped in Glacier Bay 25 years before, not bothering with a tent, and so I had seen the Lights. This night, on the Sun Princess, I guessed we were at about the same latitude as Glacier Bay, about the same time of year, and so I stepped out onto our little balcony, which faced northeast.

There was still some small amount of light from the sun, which had set three hours earlier, in the northwestern sky, but the rest of the sky was dark enough. And sure enough, I saw a pale, uniformly lit, low lying cloud stretching from the western horizon to the eastern horizon - I quickly realized this was a manifestation of the Lights. Sometimes the Lights would pulse a bit, with chunks of the cloud glowing brighter and then fading. Looking west, I saw fingers of light flickering in the sky.

I made my wife come out onto the balcony for a few minutes with me, and then she was back in bed. The show was over by 1 a.m., about 30 minutes after I first went onto the balcony.

To make some photos of the lights, I placed my camera on a coat atop the railing of the balcony, and made a series of exposures, most of them at ISO 800 at 30 seconds (the maximum time possible on my digicam). The picture I've chosen to post on pbase shows the Lights as a sort of double green band, but to my eye they were rather pale. The brighter blue at the lower bottom right of the photo is the sea, illuminated by the running lights of the ship. The dot of light on the middle right is a bright star; it trailed with the 30 second exposure, so I sharpened it with the help of Photoshop.

Of course the ship was gently rolling back and forth and moving forward at several knots an hour, blurring the image, but I hope I captured the essence of the celestial event event.