Between 8 and 9 pm on the evening of Nov 20, 2003, the southern skies over Bloomington were illuminated with faint wispy veils of red and green light from an aurora event. Having the "Northern Lights" as far south as Bloomington is a rare event. That the lights were actually visible in the southern sky and not to the north made them seem even more unusual. There links below are for two versions of the same movie, which consists of 15 sequential images. Each image is a 30 sec exposure.The movie shows changing patterns that are common to aurora displays. I did not make much of an effort to keep a uniform interval between frames. Also, I had to stop and change the batteries in the middle resulting in a change in the camera position and the slight stutter in the movie.
If you have a high speed connection, select the larger one movie. If you are on a dial-in connection, you may want to select the smaller one. In any case, the images are rather faint so the movie is best viewed in a darker room. The images were captured with a digital camera set at its maximum sensitivity (hence the high amount of grain) to allow the colors to develop.
Bloomington Aurora movie- small (300 KB)
Bloomington Aurora movie- large (1.4 MB)
To learn more about Aurora, see the Aurora Page