ERich10983 wrote:

Just got back from our local town farm. Standing out the blacksmith shop
(mandatory metal content), the whole sky is a rosy red with wide streamers
headed toward the south. Best I've seen since my childhood in Maine.

Earle Rich
Mont Vernon, NH

The wierdest one I saw was "man made". It was in '62 and I was playing boy
scientist on Johnston Island measuring ion and electron densities in the upper
atmosphere during the next to last round of US above ground nuke tests. I
remember it well, because it occurred at the same time as the "Cuban Missile
Crisis", and we were stuck on "this f**king island", wondering what awful
things might happen to our wives and kids if Kennedy and Kruschev couldn't
cool it off.

Immediately following one of the high altitude shots (IIRC it was code named
"Starfish") the whole sky turned an eiry green with dark striations in it,
from horizon to horizon. We were over a thousand miles away from Hawaii, but
the Honolulu papers reported seeing the effect that night.

The sky was bright enough to read a newspaper by and took over an hour to dim
down.

I hope that none of us nor our collective decendants never get to see one of
those again.

I've got some text and photos of the instrumentation stuff we were working
with back then up at:

http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/wisnia.htm

Was anyone else on the newsgroup involved in that testing?

Jeff

--

Jeff Wisnia (W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"If you can smile when things are going wrong, you've thought of someone to
blame it on."