Radio Aurora New York

“Powerful radio waves beamed up into the sky have created artificially enhanced auroras visible to the naked eye,” New Scientist reports.

[Image: Jan Curtis – loads of really exceptional photographs here (and that radio tower, above, is just a coincidence).]

“Todd Pedersen from the Air Force Research Laboratory in Massachusetts and Elizabeth Gerken of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have created emissions of ‘unprecedented brightness’, using pulses of radio waves sent from a base station in Alaska. ‘The beam is more like a flashlight than a laser,’ says Pedersen. ‘The total power is about the same as large shortwave transmitters like the BBC’s.'”
Now they just need to attach some radio transmitters to the tops of New York’s tallest skyscrapers, and every night the city’s skyline will be bathed in swirling auroras… Crackling wisps of a green and blue – and orange and red and yellow and white – ionized atmosphere will form snakelike rolling arcs and curtains between the mirrored outer walls of bank towers; ships at sea will see a city gone halo’d and prismatic.
The international space station floats over an earth of urban auroras – London, Shanghai, Cairo…
Auroras over the BLDGBLOG editorial offices…
Indeed, auroras coming from the BLDGBLOG editorial offices…