Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some Vacation Photos, published by johnswentworth on January 4, 2024 on LessWrong.

In the past three months, I've flown overnight from San Francisco to the UK/Europe three times.

Three times, I got a window seat on the left side of the plane.

And three times... well, see for yourself.

Key thing to know: these aurora did not look like this to the naked eye. They were usually too faint to see the color at all; they looked like faint moonlight shining around the edges of a dark cloud. Except the "cloud" was higher up than an airplane flying at 10+ km.

It wasn't apparent what they were until I blocked out light from the cabin and took a long-exposure photo. (On my phone, that just means using the "night sight" mode.) That kinda makes these aurora cooler, in a way - you won't really notice there's anything interesting there unless you know to look for it and then image it in a special way.

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