Aurora!

Haley and I got to see an Aurora during our walk this morning.* The first leg of our walk is downhill towards the North, so we generally have an excellent view of the northern sky when it isn't obscured by corner streetlights. (The corner streetlights are the blue-white mercury vapor type, as opposed to the orange sodium vapor ones used downtown that I mentioned in a previous post.)

The Aurora was of the curtain type, looking like a series of searchlights aimed straight up on the other side of Plymouth Mountain. But each beam, or each fold of the curtain, varied in intensity as I watched - some brightening, some fading.

Superstitious people see Auroras as omens. They also see comets, meteors, eclipses, crepuscular rays, the positions of the planets, the year 2000, and the Red Sox winning the World Series the week before a Presidential election as having supernatural implications. (The Red Sox winning the World Series by the dismal light of an eclipsed moon? Sheesh, if that's not one of the Seven Signs...) I am not a superstitious person. Unfortunately, a lot of people are. And many of them let their superstitions guide their hands at the voting booth last Tuesday, to re-elect a President who sees himself as a major player in the events prophesied in the Book of Revelations.

For me, the Aurora was a thing of beauty. And a sign that I may be having radio trouble again.

*I think we have determined our lower limit for air temperature for dogwalks: 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7 degrees Celsius.) Good thing there was no wind this morning.