Comet Hale-Bop, originally uploaded by Adam Piotrowski

Listening to American radio over the Internet yesterday, there was a story about a comet visible just before sunrise. I thought about it this morning as I waited for my bus in the pre-dawn darkness, under the usual overcast sky.

American media seem to often mention interesting things in the sky: space shuttles flying overhead, planetary conjunctions, etc. You hardly ever hear mention of such things here in Sweden, for the simple reason that we can hardly ever see them. In the fall, winter, and spring it is usually overcast or cloudy. In the summer, when it is slightly less cloudy, it is too light to see anything other than the sun and moon.

There’s also the problem of city lights, but that is a problem almost anywhere. Sweden certainly does have its share of rural areas with little or no outside lighting. I remember walking out on the ice on our local lake in 1996 to watch Comet Hyakutake. Even with binoculars it was pretty fuzzy, but it was still pretty exciting as the first comet I ever saw.

The big exception to all this was Comet Hale-Bop in 1997. It was so bright that I could actually sit on my front porch and see it. With binoculars it was fantastic. But it is a perfect example of the exception that proves the rule.

The one astronomical phenomenon Sweden does have is the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, but even that isn’t as visible as one might think. The auroral zones center around the magnetic poles, not the geographical poles, and the magnetic North Pole is in northern Canada. So the Northern Lights are visible far more to the south in North America than in Europe.

I’ve lived in Sweden for more than 30 years, but I’ve never seen the Northern Lights. Then again I’ve only been above the Arctic Circle once when it wasn’t summer.

It was wonderful that Christer Fuglesang became Sweden’s first astronaut, and hopefully his flight will inspire Swedish kids to go into science. Because otherwise they just don’t have the inspiration California kids get from looking up into the cloudless sky on warm days.