The Nonlinear Library LW - Some Vacation Photos by johnswentworth
Jan 4, 2024
01:02
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some Vacation Photos, published by johnswentworth on January 4, 2024 on LessWrong.
In the past three months, I've flown overnight from San Francisco to the UK/Europe three times.
Three times, I got a window seat on the left side of the plane.
And three times... well, see for yourself.
Key thing to know: these aurora did not look like this to the naked eye. They were usually too faint to see the color at all; they looked like faint moonlight shining around the edges of a dark cloud. Except the "cloud" was higher up than an airplane flying at 10+ km.
It wasn't apparent what they were until I blocked out light from the cabin and took a long-exposure photo. (On my phone, that just means using the "night sight" mode.) That kinda makes these aurora cooler, in a way - you won't really notice there's anything interesting there unless you know to look for it and then image it in a special way.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
In the past three months, I've flown overnight from San Francisco to the UK/Europe three times.
Three times, I got a window seat on the left side of the plane.
And three times... well, see for yourself.
Key thing to know: these aurora did not look like this to the naked eye. They were usually too faint to see the color at all; they looked like faint moonlight shining around the edges of a dark cloud. Except the "cloud" was higher up than an airplane flying at 10+ km.
It wasn't apparent what they were until I blocked out light from the cabin and took a long-exposure photo. (On my phone, that just means using the "night sight" mode.) That kinda makes these aurora cooler, in a way - you won't really notice there's anything interesting there unless you know to look for it and then image it in a special way.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org