What does an aurora look like?
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Aurora can also look like waves or ripples going through the sky.  I think radiating away from the pole.  That's the only kind I've seen, but it was cool and really weird.
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Solar Storms\n\nBy Sten Odenwald\nSpecial to The Washington Post\nWednesday, March 10, 1999; Page H01\n\nFor thousands of years, the aurora borealis or "northern lights" have lit the skies and human imagination with ghostly incandescence. Most often seen in Arctic regions but occasionally visible as far south as the Mediterranean, they have inspired awe, fright and a fair measure of misunderstanding.\n\nTiberius Caesar mistook their red glows for a fire in progress and dispatched an army to Ostia in 34 A.D. to inspect damage. But until the 19th century, no one seriously thought that they could hurt anybody -- unless, as an Old Norse legend warned, you happened to whistle at one!\n\nNow we know better. Technological advances have made it possible for auroras and other "storms" in space to make themselves felt in the form of power blackouts, satellite failures and even pipeline explosions.\n\nSpace weather generally varies with the 11-year sunspot cycle: the more sunspots, the more storms and the more voluminous the "solar wind," as scientists call the stream of charged particles that incessantly blows off the face of the sun. Already, we are well on the way to the next solar maximum, expected to peak next year.\n\nThe maximum usually coincides with an increase in two other kinds of extremely bad "space weather." In one, powerful solar flares hurl protons and electrons almost to the speed of light. That acceleration produces blasts of X-rays that radiate into space. Both the particles and radiation can disrupt short-wave communication on Earth.\n\nWere that not enough, the sun also can spawn billion-ton clouds of plasma and their associated magnetic fields. Traveling at more than 1 million mph, some of these "coronal mass ejections" (CMEs) may arrive at the Earth in only a few days.\n\nIn many ways, they actually are more noxious than the more familiar solar flares. CMEs pummel Earth's magnetic field like a sledgehammer 1 million miles wide and upset the delicate balances of trapped particles in the Van Allen radiation belts and elsewhere within the boundaries of Earth's magnetic field. [See illustration below].\n\nThe first indication that space weather has worsened usually is a spectacular auroral display in Arctic regions. When the solar wind hits the Earth's magnetic field, electrons and protons inside the field are accelerated into currents that flow along the gossamer-thin magnetic field lines and converge on the polar regions.\n\nAs they enter the thickening atmosphere about 500 miles above our heads, the particles collide with atoms and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, which shed their added energy as light, producing ethereal shapes and colors.\n\nBut that's not all. The motion of other populations of charged particles within Earth's magnetic field causes great currents of charged particles to circulate in space like a 10,000-mile-wide river. These invisible stratospheric rivers can alter the geomagnetic field temporarily and produce "magnetic storms."\n\nHumanity began feeling the effects of the solar maximum as soon as technology became sophisticated enough to respond. During the late 1800s, vast networks of wires were strung to carry telegraph and telephone traffic, setting the stage for a giant-scale reenactment of one of history's most famous physics experiments.\n\nEnglish physicist Michael Faraday discovered in his lab that, if you take a magnet and move it near a loop of wire, electrical current flows in the wire. The moving field induced a corresponding motion of charge in the wire. Faraday's "magnetic induction" soon was put to use in the first electric generator.\n\nExactly the same thing happened when solar storms triggered changes in Earth's magnetism, affecting thousands of miles of telegraph wires. Electrical currents induced by the changing fields often were so powerful that telegraphers didn't need
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Here is a site that shows which films are playing in the Mumbai area. It lists the Aurora, but only for the next few days. Sunday isn't on schedule yet.\n\nhttp://nowrunning.com/SearchHalls.asp?region=Mumbai
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The aurora is a glow observed in the night sky, usually in the polar zone. For this reason some scientists call it a "polar aurora" (or "aurora polaris"). In northern latitudes, it is known as "aurora borealis" which is Latin for "northern dawn" since in Europe especially, it often appears as a reddish glow on the northern horizon as if the sun were rising from an unusual direction. The aurora borealis is also called the "northern lights". The aurora borealis most often occurs from September to October and March to April. Its southern counterpart, "aurora australis", has similar properties
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yup the same phenomenon is observed near the south pole, but it has a different name. it is called 'aurora australis'
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The aurora borealis (the Northern Lights) and the aurora australis (the Southern Lights) have always fascinated mankind, and people even travel thousands of miles just to see the brilliant light shows in the earth's atmosphere. The auroras, both surrounding the north magnetic pole (aurora borealis) and south magnetic pole (aurora australis) occur when highly charged electrons from the solar wind interact with elements in the earth's atmosphere. Solar winds stream away from the sun at speeds of about 1 million miles per hour. When they reach the earth, some 40 hours after leaving the sun, they follow the lines of magnetic force generated by the earth's core and flow through the magnetosphere, a teardrop-shaped area of highly charged electrical and magnetic fields. \nAs the electrons enter the earth's upper atmosphere, they will encounter atoms of oxygen and nitrogen at altitudes from 20 to 200 miles above the earth's surface. The color of the aurora depends on which atom is struck, and the altitude of the meeting. \n\nGreen - oxygen, up to 150 miles in altitude \nRed - oxygen, above 150 miles in altitude \nBlue - nitrogen, up to 60 miles in altitude \nPurple/violet - nitrogen, above 60 miles in altitude \nAll of the magnetic and electrical forces react with one another in constantly shifting combinations. These shifts and flows can be seen as the auroras "dance," moving along with the atmospheric currents that can reach 20,000,000 amperes at 50,000 volts. (In contrast, the circuit breakers in your home will disengage when current flow exceeds 15-30 amperes at 120 volts.) \nThe auroras generally occur along the "auroral ovals," which center on the magnetic poles (not the geographic poles) and roughly correspond with the Arctic and Antarctic circles. There are times, though, when the lights are farther south, usually when there are a lot of sunspots. Sunspot activity follows an 11-year cycle. The next peak will occur in 2001 and 2002, so opportunities to see auroras outside their normal range should be good. \n\nThere are many stories about sounds associated with auroras, but there are no recordings of auroral sounds. Scientists can't agree on what would produce sounds during the aurora.
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I have never seen a ufo, but every once in a while there is a small bluish purple dot in the sky that looks like a purple pink-blueish star, it flashes and is really odd. I looked at maps and everything, there are no little radio crappy shows, or anything. in fact it's a big field in nowhere, it's scary. I'm too chicken to drive out there and see what it is. It's creppy where I live.
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It could have been a variable star or you saw a nova. check the NASA site to see if they have any news about this. I didn't see anything there but in future here is the web page for NASA\nhttp://www.nasa.gov/news/highlights/index.html\nAlso could been the space station or a satellite
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aliens by the look of it
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Aurora are generate by charged particles captured by the terrestrial magnetic field impacting atoms in the upper atmosphere and generating flourescence.  They constantly shift shape and color as the magnetic fields shift around and the particle flux changes. As such, asking how long an aurora lasts is akin to asking how long a cloud  in a hurricane lasts; the question itself is too vague to answer with confidence.
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What you see outside at night is a mixture of these:\nStars (like the sun)\nPlanets\nSattelites\nGalaxies
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i don't know but what does it look like. traveling their soon with my new husband.
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For fun, curiosity about what they look like from a different angle?
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what you actually saw was the two rainbows formed...\nyes there are two... as what you saw, the outside is fainter than the inside... and also, if there were no earth, the rainbow we see will be like a circle....
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It's:\n\nhttp://www.aurorabridal.com/prom.shtml
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I am sure you can. In some times of extreme solar activity, the Aurora Borealis are visible as far south as Southern Italy. Given the location of the Orkney Islands much further north, near Scotland, then viewing the aurorae there should be very common.\n\nI have enclosed a link to a report by a group of amateur astronomers to the Orkney Islands in an attempt to view the Aurora Borealis there (it was cloudy so they didn't see them).\n\nA second reference is a tourist site for the Orkney Islands which advertises that the aurorae are readily visible in the Orkney Islands, especially during the fall.
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Earth's most conspicuous plasmas are lightning, the trail of a shooting star, and the ordinary electric shock you get after shuffling around on your living-room carpet in your wool socks and then touching a doorknob. Electrical discharges are jagged columns of electrons that abruptly move through the air when too many collect in one place. Lightning, for instance, happens to strike Earth's surface thousands of times per hour. The centimeter-wide air column through which a bolt of lightning travels is turned into glowing plasma in a fraction of a second, having been raised to a temperature ten times that of the Sun's surface by these flowing electrons.\n\nEvery shooting star is a tiny particle of interplanetary debris moving so fast that it burns up in the air and descends to Earth as harmless cosmic dust. Almost the same thing happens to a spacecraft that reenters our atmosphere. Since its occupants don't want to land at the near-Earth orbital speed of 18,000 miles per hour (about five miles per second), the craft must slow down and its kinetic energy must go somewhere. Shock waves along the leading edge heat the craft during reentry. The heat is rapidly whisked away by protective shields. This is why the astronauts, unlike shooting stars, do not descend to Earth as dust. For several minutes during a descent, the heat is so intense that every molecule surrounding the space capsule becomes ionized, cloaking the astronauts in a temporary plasma barrier that none of our communication signals can penetrate. This is the infamous blackout period, when the craft is aglow and Mission Control knows nothing of the astronauts' well-being. The craft continues to slow down as it plows through the atmosphere. Along the way, the temperature drops, the air gets denser, and the plasma state can no longer be sustained. The electrons go back home to their atoms, and communication is quickly restored.\n\nWhile relatively rare on Earth, plasmas comprise more than 99.99 percent of all the visible matter in the cosmos. This tally includes every glowing star and "gas" cloud. Nearly all the Hubble Space Telescope's beautiful photographs of nebulae in our galaxy depict colorful gas clouds in the form of plasma. The shape and density of some of these clouds are strongly influenced by the presence of magnetic fields from nearby sources such as pulsars. The plasma can lock a magnetic field into place and torque or otherwise shape the field to its whims.