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The night between the 6th and 7th of March 2000, the biggest aurora I have ever seen, occurred in the sky above Stockholm (59,5º N). It started at 10.30 p.m. and covered the whole sky from horizon to horizon for a full hour. It was so intense it was very clearly visible even in such a well-lit up suburb as Saltsjö-Boo. I got word that the aurora had been visible in Södertälje, Västerås and all the way down to Vilnius (54,5º N) in Lithuania! In Vilnius it was described as the whole sky being red. The last time the aurora was seen in Lithuania was in 1942.
This picture suite covers some 10 minutes and is taken right above the house where I live, using a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera with a 1-second exposure time. If you really want to enjoy the enlargements, please set the standard background colour of your web browser to black.
The upper picture is made up of some of the other pictures added up, effectively giving a 5-second exposure, retaining the low noise level of a single image. You can see a few starts that have moved between the exposures.
If you want to see all the details, you can open the pictures in Photoshop and change the Levels. The pictures are relatively noise-free (except for the JPEG noise). Much of the granularity is due to the granularity of the aurora itself.
