We had another great night for northern lights on Sunday. We went to a different location a little further out of town, where we could look northward without any light pollution from the city. We walked several hundred yards from the road and parking area and had the tree-lined trail all to ourselves. The aurora came out just around midnight, with lots of colors and movement.
I really should note that even though the skies look full of color in our photos, the lights did not look like this to the naked eye. Without a camera lens, our eyes really only picked up wispy light-green patches or streaks across the sky. To my eye it was a very pale white-green; Kevin could really only see white. Neither of us could pick up the pink and red tones without looking through the camera. Kevin joked that all the aurora photos he'd ever seen in his lifetime were "lies". In reality, everyone's eyes are different, and it's possible that other people do see the full range of colors, who knows? Here was our setup in the snow (I shot this handheld so only a 10 second exposure and a little blurry).
The aurora appears to have different colors based on which kinds of atomic particles collide (oxygen or nitrogen) and at what altitude. Red occurs when the collision is 150 miles above the Earth, green is at about 100 miles, purple/pink is at about 60 miles, and very rarely people see blue colors when the particles are colliding lower than 60 miles up.
With our toasty warm clothes we were able to stay out taking photos and looking up for a couple of hours. We experimented with turning on our headlamps for a few seconds at a time to illuminate the trees and each other in our photos. We each walked over to this tree and snapped a photo. What we didn't catch is that just to the right of Kevin is some thigh-deep snow that I discovered when I walked out there. It was like being caught in quicksand -- I was flailing around and managed to get to a densely packed spot and haul myself out. Kevin had his back turned and missed it; too bad we didn't catch that on film. I was very glad to have snow bibs and good boots on!
On Monday we discovered one of the most fantastic car collections we have seen anywhere, let alone in a tiny town like Fairbanks (population less than 100,000 people). The Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum is a hidden gem - each of their 100 cars is from the 1930s or earlier, and several of the cars are the last of their kind in the world. Almost all of them are actually in running order. They even have one (a 1911 Everitt) that you can get in for a photo op, although the rest of them are hands-off, obviously.
The massive warehouse holds only part of the collection; the museum is moving to a new location sometime later this year where they will be able to put many more cars on display. I liked how each car was displayed alongside a mannequin in period clothing; it really set the scene for the kinds of people who would be driving these works of art. The cars on display ranged in age from an 1898 Hay Hotchkiss to the elegant 1936 Packard (bright yellow, in the picture below).
We are glad we chose to stay at Pike's Waterfront Lodge, instead of farther out from town. With the easy drive to town we have been able to check out some pretty good restaurants. Fun fact: Fairbanks has the most Thai restaurants per capita in the US. There are at least 15 sit down restaurants, plus I don't know how many Thai drive-thru kiosks. We remembered the good Thai food from last time we were here and made sure to hit one of our favorite spots. But we were surprised to also discover a Moldovan restaurant right in the heart of town. We are certain that we can't get Moldovan food in Phoenix, so we stopped in to try it. It was hearty and good, if a little heavy-handed with the sour cream. We probably won't be visiting Moldova anytime soon since it is right next to Ukraine, but we will definitely be rooting for them in this year's Eurovision Song Contest.
We had been hoping to go back to the World Ice Championships to catch a few photos of the sculptures lit up at night, but the timing just didn't work out (we have to sleep sometime if we're out touring all day and chasing auroras at night). Luckily our hotel had a few slightly melty and vaguely shaped sculptures for us to take some photos with. Kevin is standing by some kind of beakless bird and I don't know what the thing behind me is supposed to be. If you can figure it out, please let me know.
Pike's hotel also had a small herd of feisty reindeer onsite. We caught one of them -- let's call him Dasher -- literally playing reindeer games with a couple of oversized soccer balls. Notice the 2nd reindeer in the corner, who I nicknamed Rudolph. A few seconds after I took this shot, he tried to join in but it ended up just like the song.
Too bad this Rudolph couldn't actually fly. Run, Rudolph, run!
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