Summer nights close to the solstice are all night twilight affairs at 54 degrees north.
This panorama taken at 02:00am local time reveals a band of electric blue noctilucent clouds drifting somewhere high above the Shetland Islands and possibly even further north towards the Faroe Islands. In the background on the left are faint stars of Gemini and Lynx, in the middle is northern Auriga with Capella and the Kids and on the right is Perseus.
These blue shining high clouds occupy a thin region about 82 km above the surface of the Earth and form when meteor smoke nucleates the miniscule amounts of water present in summer to form thin clouds of tiny ice crystals high enough to be still lit by the sun.
An hour later the northern sky looked like this:
Processing: The image is a 7 panel mosaic stitched with AutoPano Pro 2.5. Each frame was pre-treated in Photoshop CS2 with a) despeckle filter b) Astrotools colour blotch removal (low frequency chrominance noise) c) Neat image noise reduction with noise profile sampled from dark sky area.
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