Front yard borealis

I’m sure I’m not the only one who had loosely held dreams of trekking northward in the depths of winter to experience the Northern Lights. Wistful mentions of Fairbanks, Nome, and Iceland would float through travel conversations, always abruptly arrested by shivers of imagined ungodly frigid temperatures.

You might notice that that last paragraph was in the past tense. Because last night, along with millions of now-sleepy people across the northern hemisphere, I got to see the aurora borealis! And…without leaving my front yard! And while wearing shorts! My mind is still blown.

Looking northwest from our driveway

LOVE the pink and green

The roof of our porch

Between this and the total eclipse...science,
nature, and creation are INCREDIBLE

My friend Linda traveled to Norway earlier this year to see the Northern Lights from a cruise ship. She said they were really pretty, but very oddly NOT what she expected. She was grateful that a naturalist onboard her ship warned the sky gazers that what they would see with their eyes would NOT be the incredible greens and purples and pinks that we have all seen in photos. Instead, they would see sort of milky white clouds and streaks, perhaps with tinges of colors, but really mostly whitish. Linda was understandably a bit miffed that this little tidbit was not part of the sales brochure.

Linda told me she was startled to find herself looking at an interesting but not utterly remarkable sky and then leaning over to look at someone’s digital camera to discover the dazzling beauty captured by long exposures.

I was so confused! How had I never heard about this before? Was it really true? Was it an unspoken agreement among Northern Lights viewers not to admit that the only way they saw the spectacular colors was via cameras?

Apparently yes.

We had some friends over last night, planned before the Northern Lights forecast popped up (with an unheard of 9.00 Kp on the Planetary K-index. Yeah, I have no idea either…). They arrived at 8:00pm for dessert and left sometime around 12:30am. We sat on our north-facing porch with frequent checks upward as the night sky darkened. I told them about Linda’s discovery. They shared my confusion and suspicion and hopes that maybe that was just a Norwegian thing.

Somewhere around 10:30pm, Rob saw something. He summoned us to the driveway. The sky definitely looked different. And it was definitely not green or purple or pink.

Over the next few hours, we stood in our driveway and eventually spread out beach blankets on our front grass to ease the neck pain. We watched as whitish streaks of light drifted around the sky. Most of the streaks were vertical, but some were horizontal, and others were arcs. Most were ahead of us from the horizon to maybe half way up. But some were directly above us.

We watched in amazement as the streaks moved. They appeared to be alive, like an amoeba in a tide pool. They did not move like clouds; instead, they often looked more like rain showers, with subtly more density and force. They sort of looked like a clotheslined bedsheet fluttering in the breeze. We would occasionally see short bursts of particles, making streaks appear for only seconds. At times, the particles would fill the sky, obliterating stars but pierced by the lights of an unusually large number of airplanes flying around. The moon was just a sliver, but the lights of the aurora borealis filled the sky as if the moon were full.

The colors, though. That’s what is still so bizarre and unexpected and, honestly, disappointing. The colors in those photos above? Yeah, not AT ALL what our eyes were seeing. In fact, not even what my circa 2020 iPhone’s camera was seeing. Grateful for friends with newer phones (this is the first time I have ever had Cell Phone Envy), the above photos were taken by Ali’s Circa 2022 phone with a night setting and automatic exposure and aperture adjustments. My phone…used while sitting right next to Ali on the blanket…took photos like this.

I was tempted to at least brighten
this so you could see something, 
but that sort of misses the point of
showing the importance of
having a good camera for 
moments like these

I discovered that I could edit the exposure settings after the fact and get something closer to Ali’s.

Much better! But still fodder for
much Camera Envy

Meanwhile, I found a photo on a local Facebook page posted by someone I don’t know that captured more of what I was seeing with my eyes.

Thank you, Person Whose Name I
Can't Find Now Because There Are
THOUSANDS of Photos on Facebook
From Last Night

We could see colors, but they were just tinges. We could see green and pink and magenta in the streaks, but they were all “ishes.” Greenish. Pinkish. Purpleish. We would see the ish and then snap photos to see what we were really seeing. It was bizarre to rely on a camera to reveal reality.

I tried taking a few photos with my mostly-abandoned, higher-quality digital camera, but they all came out as black blobs.  It wasn’t until it was too late that I remembered it has a nighttime setting. DOH!

So with five hours of sleep (thanks, hungry cat who had plenty of food but not The Right Food…), this morning I am a mixture of grateful, amazed, disappointed, confused, and full of wonder. Being able to see the Northern Lights for 4 hours from the warmth and comfort of my front yard while wearing shorts and a light jacket was not something I ever imagined would be possible. And I was enthralled watching the night sky dance in front of me, with life and energy and unpredictability. But I expected the Northern Lights would be a dazzling display of colors filling the sky, not the screen of Ali’s cell phone.

Rumors are that the lights will be putting on another show tonight. While tempted to rush to Verizon to finally take them up on their copious upgrade offers, I will probably spend some time today refamiliarizing myself with the settings on my dusty digital camera. I might even dig out the tripod.