Sunday, August 15, 2010

Natural Fireworks

A fancy name for things like Stromboli at night, the green flash, and a meteor shower. Obviously that’s what we recently saw, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it on our blog. The strange thing is, we saw them in such rapid succession. First Stromboli, due to a detour in our course to Sardinia. Technically we saw the green flash first, at sunset, but we had been seeing smoke coming out of the crater in squirts ever since we shut down the engine about a couple miles off the coast. We even got to swim in the ocean for a bit. When it got dark, we started seeing bursts of orange and red lava and gas shooting out of the volcano when it had been smoke during daylight. That night and the next night we saw meteors. I saw five of them before I had to go to bed. The last one was spectacular, an incredibly long streak of light stretching from the apex of the sky to the horizon. Sometimes nature can be more spectacular that the best fireworks.

--Orion Date

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