01 February 2008

concentrated sunrise

After hearing about them about 3 years ago for the first time, I finally saw glitský this morning. These peculiar high atmosphere clouds are a rare phenomenon in far northern places, and are one of the other rewards of the extended sunrise period in the wintertime.

My commute this morning had me heading straight towards them, so for once I wanted the stop lights to last for as long as they liked, since at every look the clouds contained different colors. First palest cobalt was surrounded by feathers of pink, then the center morphed into electric lavender with swirls of green as the edges deepened to red.

Like a concentrated sunrise, these veil-thin clouds eventually manifested all the colors of the rainbow in muted shades on my 15-minute drive, swirling and pulsating like the pre-dawn cousin of northern lights. I apparently got the best of the show, since now they've dissolved like a figment of my imagination, and the space they just occupied is now being consumed by the clouds of steam from Nesjavellir that rise from the horizon to the east.

4 comments:

Paul said...

Wow, fascinating stuff! Congrats on seeing something so rare.

Anonymous said...

Sounds awesome...

and guess what? My computer died and I got fed up and bought a macbook.

ECS said...

paul: you'll be seeing rare things soon yourself with all the moving. Keep writing- I'm reading faithfully!

angel: yeah, they were supercool. Congrats on the mac!

tsduff said...

Those clouds look magical. I'm glad you saw them - and thank you for including a picture of them. My one and only site of the northern lights was unforgetable as well, and I saw them in Iceland.