Taking photographs of the Northern Lights is hard. They fad in and out, shimmering across the sky, bright enough to see, but faint enough for the stars to show through.

Taking a photograph of them through a window on a 747 speeding through the night sky is damn near impossible.

Flying back from San Francisco last week, our plane fly through a major geomagnetic storm, and the aurora were (and you have to take my word for it) spectacular. Faint green ribbons stretched out across the sky, broad bands of light that flickered and writhed, nature's neon glow writ large high above us.

I thought it was worth trying to take a photograph, but most of my images came out blank. Apart from one, an out of focus blur that just has a sense of the colour of things. With a bit of post processing, here it is...



VS20, somewhere high over Canada
October 2010