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Aurora Coolness

|< < Prev #3196 (January 19, 2026)

Title text: I've had countless nights where the line never left the bottom zone of the graph, but the few moments where it's climbed all the way to the top have made up for them all.

|< < Prev Random Explanation

Explanation

The graph in this comic reports events during an aurora rated on 'coolness' over time, and shows that truly interesting events are fairly frequent, but often short-lived and not predictable. Both the caption and the title text encourage the viewer of an aurora to be patient with the 'boring' stuff, as more exciting events could happen with little or no notice. The caption gives general advice, while the title text reports Randall's own experiences.

The comic was published at around the time when low-latitude auroras were particularly anticipated to be visible, and may even have been displaying themselves to Randall in the immediate run-up to publication — unless, as indicated by the comic (and title text) it was mainly the anticipation of this that was exciting, with any eventual brief sighting merely being icing upon the proverbial cake. Randall has previously (2233: Aurora Meaning) established that auroras are "cool" when they occur at subpolar latitudes, including the latitude of eastern Massachusetts, where Randall resides.

This comic is similar to 2914: Eclipse Coolness, in which the occurrence of truly-interesting ("cool") events is reported as a function of location; the graph reports that most of the interesting stuff happens close to the path of totality, with the event elsewhere reported as boring.

Transcript

[A graph of “aurora coolness” (Y-axis) over time (X-axis), with aurora coolness having four categories from coolest to least cool:

• Spectacular ribbons of color spanning the sky and illuminating the landscape
• “Oh wow, it’s getting really bright now.”
• Sheets and pillars of light, colors faintly visible
• Visible glow on the horizon, color only visible in photos

The timeline in the graph, which spans “many hours” horizontally, starts at “visible glow” and gradually moves up and down, pretty soon reaching a sharp peak in “spectacular ribbons”, which is labeled “5 or 10 minutes”, then wobbles back down almost to “sheets and pillars”, then almost all the way up again to “spectacular ribbons”, and eventually ending back at “visible glow”.]

[Caption below the panel:] Aurora tip: If you get good views of the aurora, keep watching the sky; you might suddenly get great ones.

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