© Vimeo/Lights Over Lapland
"They were so intense that lots of the tourists on the ground thought they were looking at daytime auroras. I had to explain that they were actually clouds in the stratosphere," says Blakley.
Polar stratospheric clouds are newsworthy because normally the stratosphere has no clouds at all. Home to the ozone layer, the stratosphere is arid and almost always transparent. Only when the temperature drops to a staggeringly cold -85C can sparse water molecules assemble themselves into icy stratospheric clouds. PSCs are far more rare than auroras.
© Lights Over Lapland
The outbreak has continued on Dec. 30th. "Today I got to see some of the brightest PSCs I've ever seen during all of my years watching the sky," reports Göran Strand, who sends this picture from Jämtland, Sweden:
"They were so bright, they even lit up the surrounding landscape," he marveled.
PSCs are intensely colorful because they are made of a special type of ice. High-altitude sunlight shining through microscopic crystals only ~10µm across produce a bright iridescent glow unlike the lesser iridescence of ordinary tropospheric clouds.
Stay tuned for updates as the outbreak continues.
Polar stratospheric clouds above Abisko National park, Sweden from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.
You mean dazzling and ever increasingly copious amounts of recording devices and the dissemination of images. Don't continue making the mistake of confusing the two ( The recording devices, and the subject matter being recorded ), e.g. The penchant for reports of meteor sightings, that somehow this means they are on the increase(meteors).