Wow, REALLY fast

For those on the GT SETI@Home team (or running SETI@Home in general) - if you have a relatively recent nVidia video card, be sure to update your BOINC client - SETI can now use your graphics card to run specific job types, and on my new machine (quad core 2.66 GHz, nVidia 9500GT graphics card) the graphics card is actually faster than all four CPU cores combined, for these apps.

There's a link on the download page about requirements, listing supported cards and with links to updated drivers (you need a driver that supports running computational jobs on the GPU).

If you're not on the GT team and would like to be, join team "General Technics".

Aurora - NOT

Upon taking another look at the aurora, and thinking about how it behaved, I don't believe it was aurora. Those were light pillars, ice crystals in some layer of the atmosphere reflecting ground lights.