March of the Penguins and more ....
It’s funny that these days I feel the need to start most of my posts with "I haven't blogged in a while". So this time I won't! As I wrote to friend this morning, half-baked ideas keep coming to my mind, but I lose steam by the time I get to blogger.com.Anyways, what else can I start off with, huh? So movies, it is! I saw March of the Penguins on Hallmark this week. Nice movie! All this while I was assuming it was a story like Happy Feet. It was an informative and engrossing documentary. Tough life those penguins lead, I must say - battling the coldest weather on earth! Did you know that male penguins don't eat for a whole 125 days??!! And the female penguins travel for miles and miles to get to food (the ocean), after they lay their egg and hand them to the male penguin?
The movie also had a reference to southern lights. I had always heard of the Southern Lights and Northern Lights phenomenon. So I looked it up on Wikipedia this time, and here is the link.
Auroras (Northern and Southern Lights) are caused by high energy particles from the solar wind, which are trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. As these particles spiral back and forth along the magnetic field lines, they come down into the atmosphere near the north and south magnetic poles where the magnetic field lines disappear into the body of the Earth.
The delicate colors are caused by energetic electrons colliding with oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. This excites the molecules, and when they decay from the excited states they emit the light that we see in the aurora.
[Reference: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/earth/aurora.html]
Here are some wonderful pictures: http://www.geo.mtu.edu/weather/aurora/images/aurora/jan.curtis/
I will signoff on that note. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!
posted by PH @ Friday, February 02, 2007
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