Aurora Borealis
WOW!!!
One for the Bucket List, tonight. By chance I saw on my local subreddit yesterday (Thursday) that there was a very good chance of strong aurorae tonight. This wasn't that claim's first rodeo; we've gotten aurora advisories on occasion. But this was forecast to be the strongest geomagnetic storm in almost twenty years, and today the forecast firmed up, with reports of atmospheric disturbance unlike anything in recent years, promising extraordinary things. The NOAA aurora forecast site briefly got overwhelmed, which was a good sign.
I monitored the forecasts closely, because I like to build a picture in my mind of what is going to happen before it happens, but eventually I decided that at some point you just have to close the reports and get out there for yourself. It didn't matter what the forecasts said: I had decided to go out Aurora Hunting! >:)
After twilight was growing deep, I set out on the South Bay Trail for Boulevard Park, where I had decided I would make my stand trying to see the aurorae. That's quite a walk, especially by dark, and I had considered going to a park Downtown or to the Commercial Street Garage roof deck, but I know the trail to Boulevard Park (which is helpful in the dark); and I didn't fancy loitering on top of a parking garage for hours given that we are living in a high-crime era; and no park within closer range was going to have views as good as Boulevard. So for Boulevard Park I made!
I have never knowingly seen the aurorae before. It's quite possible I've glimpsed them in the past without recognizing them as such, because an aurora can be very gaslighty: If the aurora is weak, or if your eyes aren't adjusted yet, or if the sky has other light in it (e.g. city glow), it's easy to mistake the aurora for clouds or city glow on the sky-or even for nothing at all. So for all I know I have seen them before. That said, they almost never come this far south, so traditionally when they have shown up they have only been visible around the northern horizon.
In any case, my official tally sheet stood at Zero when I set out.
It only took me a couple minutes after setting out from my apartment to meet someone on the boardwalk looking up at the sky. I asked him if he was aurora hunting and he said yes, and then I realized that the long, wispy cloud he was looking at in the sky overhead was not a cloud.
That was when I knew that this was going to be good. The aurora at that moment only looked like the sky had a bit of a milk stain that hadn't washed out all the way. The human eye's capacity for discerning color is very poor in low light, so most celestial phenomena look gray or very muted in color unless they are super bright. But it was still twilight, and I had only just stepped out of my apartment, so my eyes weren't adjusted yet. And the waxing crescent Moon was up and adding its own light to the sky.
But it didn't matter, because now I knew I was in for a treat. For one thing, the aurorae were going to happen because they were already happening. For another, this wasn't going to be limited to the northern horizon. This show would be directly overhead.
Along the way I found that Bellingham's city street lamps along Boulevard still have at least a few sodium bulbs, which if you know me you understand was a treat in itself and a wonderful omen.
Navigating the trail mostly by logic and the thin delineation of lightness indicating the edges of the trail, it was quite dark as I crossed the railroad tracks and entered Boulevard Park. Despite being more than half past nine and dark, the place was full of people! I realized I might not even get a bench. But this was genuinely one of the happiest things of the entire experience for me: There were so many people who had come out to see it, even in our modern age where it seems as though nothing natural can thrill most folks anymore. The attendance at the park was a reminder to me that appearances can be deceiving and that humanity has plenty of good eggs. I sat on a rock whose top was polished at an angle; probably a marker but if so I couldn't make it out.
My biggest questions about the aurorae were how they would appear to the naked eye. I was aware that camera images and video exaggerate the brightness and colorfulness that the human eye sees; this is true for all space / night sky photography. And I'd heard many times over the years that the color in particular can be very muted in the aurorae. But I had also heard stories of people of the north who reported firsthand seeing all the delicate colors of the rainbow in the aurorae's celestial glow, even the rarest colors: the blues and oranges. (Green is the most common aurora color by far, followed by purple, then red. Then, considerably more rare, blue, yellow, and finally orange.) So I wasn't sure what I would get, and I was prepared for the aurorae to look nothing but milky.
The flipside, of course, is that, if you have a camera, you can see things in the sky that your eyes perhaps can't. And so I went to my phone's camera, and, to my immense thankfulness, I discovered that it has a Nighttime mode I didn't know about. By clicking a photo and holding the phone very still for a few seconds, and with a little whiz-bang photo processing afterward, that mode takes pictures that are frankly amazing. I could immediately see color in the aurora that I wasn't seeing with my eyes.
I sat around for a while, taking it all in as well as taking more pictures than I had any reason to be taking. Eventually a bench nearby opened up as a gaggle of folks went down to the water, and I got something more comfortable to sit on. I sat on one edge of the bench so as to leave room for others, and in the hopes that I might meet someone!
The aurorae grew more powerful, and the sky grew darker, and eventually it became possible to discern the faint indications of color with my naked eyes. The answer to my question is that, usually, the aurorae either look milky white, or milky white with a very subtle "glow" of color. I could tell that the aurora was green, or occasionally red, even if I couldn't necessarily see those colors explicitly. Meanwhile my camera was showing me many different colors, all quite vibrant. This was the real deal!!
Even this much was very impressive and worth coming out for. I was especially pleased that the best viewing at first was actually south of overhead; we were fully underneath it; it must've spanned all the way down to Oregon.
However, early in the ten o'clock hour, a little over half an hour into my visit at the park, the aurora borealis decided to show me what it could really do. For about one minute, the sky looked like nothing I have a comparison for, except maybe some special effects in movies. The colors of the aurorae became clearly visible, and the dancing and swirling came alive, and it filled up the whole sky, west to east, south to north. Every direction, aurorae. No "northern" lights were these. Epithets unknowable escaped me, and I cannot speak to what I felt.
The crowd, which evidently had quite a few college students, was a mixture of awed and irreverent. People were clearly very impressed, and so was I. I overheard many people say what I had said, that they had never seen this before. It was so many people's first time. And I overheard the NOAA name-dropped; someone even explained for a friend's benefit the full "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." I overheard much aurora trivia, virtually all of it accurate!
Someone did sit down on the bench next to me. An Asian of late middle age, though in the darkness I mistook her for male until she eventually spoke to me. Her name was Hua (I'm not sure of the spelling), and she told me that she didn't know about the aurorae had only stopped because she had been driving along and saw that the Boulevard Park parking lot full at ten pm, and had decided to see what was up. A friend of hers, Sofia (also not sure of the spelling), joined us, and they mostly hung out with each other, but didn't completely forget about me, and I had space trivia to share.
Time wore on, and about half past eleven or so they left. I myself stayed another hour, till half past midnight, when the Moon set, by which point the aurorae were calming down. Most folks had already left, but there were still enough people left that it felt like a "crowd," albeit a thin one: There were still a handful of people in all directions. I liked that a lot.
It had become evident to me in the course of my viewing that this was as good as aurorae get, that the only way my viewing experience could have been any better is if I had been in a dark skies region. The lights from cars and bikes and flashlights at the park, plus the strong glow from Downtown Bellingham, meant that I never developed full night vision, and by the reduced number of stars in the sky it was clear of course that the full depth of the aurorae were never going to be visible. That's the city for you, and it was something I had considered before heading out to see the aurorae, but with no car anymore I never had the choice of leaving town, so it wasn't a stress point.
I walked home up the South Bay Trail, which this time was considerably darker. Thankfully I didn't cross paths with anyone, as I was worried about spooking them, walking alone with no flashlight after midnight.
I didn't stop at home but went on into Downtown to pick up some pizza slices from Pye Hole as a special treat. On my way back, someone up in a balcony where they were having a party called hello to me and asked if I had seen the Northern Lights, which I replied I had, and I felt very happy at having been asked.
A block later I realized the aurorae had picked up again, and were actually quite dazzling.
I went up to my own balcony and, wow. A couple things: First of all, if I had never gone out tonight, I still would have gotten an excellent show, as long as I had known to look outside. The aurora borealis was clearly visible even from the heart of the city. Second of all, this was actually the most kinetically active I had seen the aurorae all night: They were fiercely and swiftly flashing in and out and swooping across the sky. Incredible!! They had been much more subdued back at the park. I took a few more pictures, and interestingly the only color now was green. So aurora color and aurora kinetic intensity aren't necessarily related!
The Aurora Borealis really is a Bucket List item for me. I have wanted to see it for many years. There is an aurora observatory in Norway I've long wanted to visit, but that would be many thousands of dollars. But instead the aurorae came to me, and, considering that the only money I spent this evening was twelve bucks on pizza, I can't imagine a better bargain.
After a nice dinner I was checking out the local subreddit, meaning to thank the person who had originally posted the thread that alerted me to this event, and the whole subreddit is overrun with people's aurora photos. Everyone is so happy! One folk was talking about how they'd lived here for fifty years and had never seen an aurora as impressive as this. The news reports are similarly plastered with headlines about Aurorae Borealis and Aurora Australis across the nation and the world.
This was a special day, even though I didn't know it would be a special day till yesterday. May 10 - 11, 2024: the night I saw the Aurora Borealis.
This was just as cool as the total solar eclipse I saw in 2017, and, like that, I have no comparison for it. Just...wow.
I am going to edit this entry in a little bit to link to my Facebook album where I'll be uploading my pictures. So if you see this entry and don't see the link yet, come back in a day or so and check out the link!
UPDATE: See the photo album I made on Facebook.
One for the Bucket List, tonight. By chance I saw on my local subreddit yesterday (Thursday) that there was a very good chance of strong aurorae tonight. This wasn't that claim's first rodeo; we've gotten aurora advisories on occasion. But this was forecast to be the strongest geomagnetic storm in almost twenty years, and today the forecast firmed up, with reports of atmospheric disturbance unlike anything in recent years, promising extraordinary things. The NOAA aurora forecast site briefly got overwhelmed, which was a good sign.
I monitored the forecasts closely, because I like to build a picture in my mind of what is going to happen before it happens, but eventually I decided that at some point you just have to close the reports and get out there for yourself. It didn't matter what the forecasts said: I had decided to go out Aurora Hunting! >:)
After twilight was growing deep, I set out on the South Bay Trail for Boulevard Park, where I had decided I would make my stand trying to see the aurorae. That's quite a walk, especially by dark, and I had considered going to a park Downtown or to the Commercial Street Garage roof deck, but I know the trail to Boulevard Park (which is helpful in the dark); and I didn't fancy loitering on top of a parking garage for hours given that we are living in a high-crime era; and no park within closer range was going to have views as good as Boulevard. So for Boulevard Park I made!
I have never knowingly seen the aurorae before. It's quite possible I've glimpsed them in the past without recognizing them as such, because an aurora can be very gaslighty: If the aurora is weak, or if your eyes aren't adjusted yet, or if the sky has other light in it (e.g. city glow), it's easy to mistake the aurora for clouds or city glow on the sky-or even for nothing at all. So for all I know I have seen them before. That said, they almost never come this far south, so traditionally when they have shown up they have only been visible around the northern horizon.
In any case, my official tally sheet stood at Zero when I set out.
It only took me a couple minutes after setting out from my apartment to meet someone on the boardwalk looking up at the sky. I asked him if he was aurora hunting and he said yes, and then I realized that the long, wispy cloud he was looking at in the sky overhead was not a cloud.
That was when I knew that this was going to be good. The aurora at that moment only looked like the sky had a bit of a milk stain that hadn't washed out all the way. The human eye's capacity for discerning color is very poor in low light, so most celestial phenomena look gray or very muted in color unless they are super bright. But it was still twilight, and I had only just stepped out of my apartment, so my eyes weren't adjusted yet. And the waxing crescent Moon was up and adding its own light to the sky.
But it didn't matter, because now I knew I was in for a treat. For one thing, the aurorae were going to happen because they were already happening. For another, this wasn't going to be limited to the northern horizon. This show would be directly overhead.
Along the way I found that Bellingham's city street lamps along Boulevard still have at least a few sodium bulbs, which if you know me you understand was a treat in itself and a wonderful omen.
Navigating the trail mostly by logic and the thin delineation of lightness indicating the edges of the trail, it was quite dark as I crossed the railroad tracks and entered Boulevard Park. Despite being more than half past nine and dark, the place was full of people! I realized I might not even get a bench. But this was genuinely one of the happiest things of the entire experience for me: There were so many people who had come out to see it, even in our modern age where it seems as though nothing natural can thrill most folks anymore. The attendance at the park was a reminder to me that appearances can be deceiving and that humanity has plenty of good eggs. I sat on a rock whose top was polished at an angle; probably a marker but if so I couldn't make it out.
My biggest questions about the aurorae were how they would appear to the naked eye. I was aware that camera images and video exaggerate the brightness and colorfulness that the human eye sees; this is true for all space / night sky photography. And I'd heard many times over the years that the color in particular can be very muted in the aurorae. But I had also heard stories of people of the north who reported firsthand seeing all the delicate colors of the rainbow in the aurorae's celestial glow, even the rarest colors: the blues and oranges. (Green is the most common aurora color by far, followed by purple, then red. Then, considerably more rare, blue, yellow, and finally orange.) So I wasn't sure what I would get, and I was prepared for the aurorae to look nothing but milky.
The flipside, of course, is that, if you have a camera, you can see things in the sky that your eyes perhaps can't. And so I went to my phone's camera, and, to my immense thankfulness, I discovered that it has a Nighttime mode I didn't know about. By clicking a photo and holding the phone very still for a few seconds, and with a little whiz-bang photo processing afterward, that mode takes pictures that are frankly amazing. I could immediately see color in the aurora that I wasn't seeing with my eyes.
I sat around for a while, taking it all in as well as taking more pictures than I had any reason to be taking. Eventually a bench nearby opened up as a gaggle of folks went down to the water, and I got something more comfortable to sit on. I sat on one edge of the bench so as to leave room for others, and in the hopes that I might meet someone!
The aurorae grew more powerful, and the sky grew darker, and eventually it became possible to discern the faint indications of color with my naked eyes. The answer to my question is that, usually, the aurorae either look milky white, or milky white with a very subtle "glow" of color. I could tell that the aurora was green, or occasionally red, even if I couldn't necessarily see those colors explicitly. Meanwhile my camera was showing me many different colors, all quite vibrant. This was the real deal!!
Even this much was very impressive and worth coming out for. I was especially pleased that the best viewing at first was actually south of overhead; we were fully underneath it; it must've spanned all the way down to Oregon.
However, early in the ten o'clock hour, a little over half an hour into my visit at the park, the aurora borealis decided to show me what it could really do. For about one minute, the sky looked like nothing I have a comparison for, except maybe some special effects in movies. The colors of the aurorae became clearly visible, and the dancing and swirling came alive, and it filled up the whole sky, west to east, south to north. Every direction, aurorae. No "northern" lights were these. Epithets unknowable escaped me, and I cannot speak to what I felt.
The crowd, which evidently had quite a few college students, was a mixture of awed and irreverent. People were clearly very impressed, and so was I. I overheard many people say what I had said, that they had never seen this before. It was so many people's first time. And I overheard the NOAA name-dropped; someone even explained for a friend's benefit the full "National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." I overheard much aurora trivia, virtually all of it accurate!
Someone did sit down on the bench next to me. An Asian of late middle age, though in the darkness I mistook her for male until she eventually spoke to me. Her name was Hua (I'm not sure of the spelling), and she told me that she didn't know about the aurorae had only stopped because she had been driving along and saw that the Boulevard Park parking lot full at ten pm, and had decided to see what was up. A friend of hers, Sofia (also not sure of the spelling), joined us, and they mostly hung out with each other, but didn't completely forget about me, and I had space trivia to share.
Time wore on, and about half past eleven or so they left. I myself stayed another hour, till half past midnight, when the Moon set, by which point the aurorae were calming down. Most folks had already left, but there were still enough people left that it felt like a "crowd," albeit a thin one: There were still a handful of people in all directions. I liked that a lot.
It had become evident to me in the course of my viewing that this was as good as aurorae get, that the only way my viewing experience could have been any better is if I had been in a dark skies region. The lights from cars and bikes and flashlights at the park, plus the strong glow from Downtown Bellingham, meant that I never developed full night vision, and by the reduced number of stars in the sky it was clear of course that the full depth of the aurorae were never going to be visible. That's the city for you, and it was something I had considered before heading out to see the aurorae, but with no car anymore I never had the choice of leaving town, so it wasn't a stress point.
I walked home up the South Bay Trail, which this time was considerably darker. Thankfully I didn't cross paths with anyone, as I was worried about spooking them, walking alone with no flashlight after midnight.
I didn't stop at home but went on into Downtown to pick up some pizza slices from Pye Hole as a special treat. On my way back, someone up in a balcony where they were having a party called hello to me and asked if I had seen the Northern Lights, which I replied I had, and I felt very happy at having been asked.
A block later I realized the aurorae had picked up again, and were actually quite dazzling.
I went up to my own balcony and, wow. A couple things: First of all, if I had never gone out tonight, I still would have gotten an excellent show, as long as I had known to look outside. The aurora borealis was clearly visible even from the heart of the city. Second of all, this was actually the most kinetically active I had seen the aurorae all night: They were fiercely and swiftly flashing in and out and swooping across the sky. Incredible!! They had been much more subdued back at the park. I took a few more pictures, and interestingly the only color now was green. So aurora color and aurora kinetic intensity aren't necessarily related!
The Aurora Borealis really is a Bucket List item for me. I have wanted to see it for many years. There is an aurora observatory in Norway I've long wanted to visit, but that would be many thousands of dollars. But instead the aurorae came to me, and, considering that the only money I spent this evening was twelve bucks on pizza, I can't imagine a better bargain.
After a nice dinner I was checking out the local subreddit, meaning to thank the person who had originally posted the thread that alerted me to this event, and the whole subreddit is overrun with people's aurora photos. Everyone is so happy! One folk was talking about how they'd lived here for fifty years and had never seen an aurora as impressive as this. The news reports are similarly plastered with headlines about Aurorae Borealis and Aurora Australis across the nation and the world.
This was a special day, even though I didn't know it would be a special day till yesterday. May 10 - 11, 2024: the night I saw the Aurora Borealis.
This was just as cool as the total solar eclipse I saw in 2017, and, like that, I have no comparison for it. Just...wow.
I am going to edit this entry in a little bit to link to my Facebook album where I'll be uploading my pictures. So if you see this entry and don't see the link yet, come back in a day or so and check out the link!
UPDATE: See the photo album I made on Facebook.