Aurora Magic

Seeing the Northern Lights has been on my bucket list for years.   I wanted to experience the brilliant colors and moving shafts of light, like I'd heard you could see over the far northern latitudes during winter months.  But I thought I'd have to travel someplace far north, such as Iceland or Alaska to realize my dream. 

Although every once in a great while auroras are seen near my home, they are usually very faint.  Then about three weeks ago the sun started experiencing several extremely severe solar storms.  These geomagnetic disturbances were of a level not seen for over 20 years.  The sun began producing large numbers of sunspots which led to something called a coronal mass ejection.  On the night of May 10th, an unusually large number of charged particles from the sun streamed into the earth's atmosphere, creating auroras that were seen all over the world, as far south as Texas and Florida.

On May 10th, I happened to be visiting my son in Montana.  I'd heard lots of chatter about the recent huge solar storms, but didn't really think much about aurora potential.  Then later that day my Facebook feed started to fill with aurora photos from places further east.  It was everywhere!  Hmmm.....maybe I needed to stay up a bit later tonight.

Where my son lives, in early May it really doesn't start getting dark until after 9:30 pm.  After the sun finally dropped, I kept running outside his house to scan the sky overhead.  Finally a bit after 10:00, I started to notice a faint pillar of light in the northwestern sky.  Somewhere I'd heard the auroras were more visible by taking a photograph, so I snapped a shot with my cell phone camera.  There on my screen were several green pillars of light against a faint purple background.  The aurora had arrived!

Excited, I ran into my son's house to grab my big camera, shouting to him that the aurora was here.  We stood in his yard snapping photos for a few minutes.  Then my son suggested we drive up to a large hill on the outskirts of town for a better view of the night sky with less light pollution.

My son's idea was a winner.  From our high perch we could see the entire sky unfolding above us.  Faint streaks of light stretched across the horizon, from east to west.  Although dim, we began to make out colors.  Then the lights appeared to slowly move across the sky.  My son and I were absolutely spellbound.  It was magical watching the light bands change shapes and directions.

Again, photographing these streaks really brought out the colors, producing images of dazzling greens and purples.  Because cameras have higher apertures than the human eye, they let in more light (aka they see better in darkness than we do).  That's why the auroras became more visible when photographed.  I alternated between using my DSLR and cell phone camera, and found my Samsung S22 did nearly as good a job.

Properly capturing the northern lights with a camera requires long exposures.  Although I usually tote my tripod with me wherever I travel, on this trip I'd left it at home.  I was kicking myself about now!  To compensate, I turned up my camera's ISO and hand held it as steady as I could manage for about a third of second exposure.  Luckily, I'd packed a wide angle lens with a f2.8 aperture so that helped.  The images were a bit dark, so a bit of creative post-processing with Lightroom brought out the lovely light show colors.

 

My son and I sat on the hill for nearly an hour watching the light show.  But I had a 10-hour drive the next day and needed to get some sleep, so finally we headed back to his house.  Despite quite a bit of light pollution, the northern lights were also visible in town, so I snapped a few final sky images above a church steeple and in front of the nearby water tower.

The next day one of my son's friends who'd stayed up all night, said the colors really intensified around 1 am.  A few of my fellow photography buddies back home reported the same.  I felt a bit of FOMO for not burning the midnight oil a bit longer to witness this.  But on the plus side, at least I was able to complete my long drive without feeling sleepy.

I'm happy I got to experience and photograph this historic aurora show over the Montana skies.  It's definitely a phenomenon I never thought would happen so far south.  Scientists are saying that the sun is still quite active, and more solar storms are predicted in the next few months.  So maybe I'll get another chance to see the aurora where I live.  

If all else fails, I can always plan that trip to Fairbanks next February.......