Wow! Strange and marvelous.
Just make a look at this map of America at night. As you'd anticipate, the
cities are blazing, the Great Lakes and the oceans dark, but if you look at the
center, where the Eastern lights give way to the unfilled Western plains,
there's a mysterious bunch of light there that makes wonder.
It's a slight to the left, high
up near the Canadian edge. Now run your eye up that line of lights at the
center of the country, look over to the upper left: There's a bit that looks
like a big city but there is no big city in that part of North Dakota. There's
mostly lawn.
And North Dakota, on several nights,
is almost as intense as the aurora borealis. Looking down from the
International Space location, those lights are the North Dakota oil fields. The
green curve, of course, is the aurora.
