Aurora: A Time-Lapse of Tonight's Lights

Tonight the Northern Lights appeared early above Sodankylä. The western horizon wasn't even completely dark yet. Here is a short (1 min) time-lapse film spanning two hours of observation with the All-Sky Camera of the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO), Sodankylä, Finland.

The film, taken on 1st March 2013, begins at 1700 UTC (1900 EET) and ends at 1900 UTC (2100 EET).

UPDATE: All of this great night in one time-lapse film!

The all-sky camera uses a fish-eye lens with 180° field of view pointing vertically up. It takes grey-scale images through filters of green, blue and red. The green image is taken every 20 seconds, the red and blue images are taken once per minute. These images are then overlaid to make an RGB (false-)colour image. The blue and red images are recycled to cover those green frames, for which there's no red or blue data. This sometimes results in blue lights being out of place. But this is a small price to pay for the overall colour effect.

Enjoy!