Shady business

1.7.2021

Coming night was going to be warm and beautiful, so I packed my equipment and headed to the idyllig village of Kallela to see if I could get that countryside landscape together with noctilucent clouds(*) in same photo. Perhaps I could also get that horses with noctilucent clouds photo taken, that I had long been dreaming about!

NLC's appeared soon after I had arrived at the site, and they were mostly on eastern and northeastern sky. I was walking along the countryside road and taking photos of the NLC's. Eventually I noticed that the NLC's were getting brighter in the southern sky, that made me to change point of view and to walk back to the car. Then I noticed, that one of the legs of my tripod had become loose. I had learned my lesson earlier, and I stopped taking photos and walked back to my car to fix the issue. I remembered how my camera once fell to the ground with lens on because "someone" had been to lazy to walk to the car and get some tools to fix the problem early. (yes, yes, I have a hex screwdriver in my equipment. It just happens to be always in my backpack and also this time the backpack was in my car). When I was walking back to my car, I heard approaching car sounds behind me.

It was twilight (as we never get proper darkness here in southern Finland in the middle of the summer) and that's why I hadn't taken a flashlight with me (because I was thinking that I can manage my business even without it, because it won't even get properly dark). The car was driving fast and so I jumped in a barn that happened to be near me by the road. When the car was driving past, I was able to read word "police" in the side of the car. I jumped back to the road and sighed, well I know what it looks like when you are wandering alone around some farmyard site in the middle of the night - a really shady business! I quickly made up a short explanation in my mind as the NLC's were getting brighter and I couldn't afford waste more time. When I was walking towards the police car, the reverse lights of the car lit up and it started reversing towards me. First thing I heard and saw was them opening the window and some laughter with words "I told you, that she had a camera!" Soon the joyful and smiling policeman shouted at me "what are you photographing here?" I said that I'm photographing noctilucent clouds, and soon I had to explain them what they are. Their car was parked so that they couldn't see them. I asked them to jump out of the car so that they cold see them better. Then I realized, how and with what tone I said that..while the policeman came out from their car, they were laughing and said that "our roles were a little bit upside down this time", and then we all were laughing!

Eventually three of us were standing in the middle of the countryside road in the middle of the summer night. We wished safe driving to each other and I was also able to tighten the screws of my tripod.

Meanwhile I heard some neighing behind me. It looked like the horses had come to me to assist me in my nightly photography session. I asked one of them, if they were willing to assist the photographer, and soon I got a happy neigh as a reply, of course! Result was a stylish pose and I finally got the photo that I had dreamed about!

Thanks for the helpful gelding of Kallela and for the VS-patrol team of Uusikaupunki :)

*Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. When viewed from space, they are called Polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs), detectable as a diffuse scattering layer of water ice crystals near the summer polar mesopause. They consist of ice crystals and from the ground are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between ±50° and ±70°. Too faint to be seen in daylight, they are visible only when the observer and the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow, but while these very high clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggest that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere - creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds. (Source: Wikipedia)