The Season Opens

True darkness is back at the latitudes this book is about. Before the first nights, the archive’s own numbers: how strong the sky has been over the last twelve months, this year beside the last two, where the solar cycle is — and what the next 48 hours say.

Every figure names its source and its window, and the year still running is marked provisional, because it is. Kp is one number for the whole planet: a storm day is a day the sky was active enough somewhere under the auroral oval — you still need a dark, clear sky of your own. Between the numbers, frames from the last three springs in Lofoten, each with the archive’s Kp for the hour it was made.