I have been much disappointed by Aurora Borealis
performances over my life. Each time they predict one might be visible in our
latitudes, I waited up and saw nothing. To be fair, auroras (aurorae?) are kind
of fickle. They are created by solar storms that send charged particle into
Earth’s upper atmosphere where they interact the atoms there. The timing has to
be right. The direction of the charged particles has to be right. That can all
be a bit hard to predict. Also, I live close to the 45th parallel.
Not a great spot to watch auroras from. We rarely get any this far south.
Still, sometimes they predict when it is possible, and I
go out and look to no avail. Last year there was a great aurora that lots of
people who live where I do, saw. I didn’t, not for want of trying. My wife
and I drove around to places where there was not a lot of light pollution, but
no dice. The next morning we saw lots of posts from people who had seen it,
even from places I would not think would be good viewing spots.
But one time I
saw it and didn’t realize it. I was out on the Spotted Owl survey with my
partner Ed. Around 2:00 AM we were at a station where we could see a red glow
in the sky. We were south of Toledo (Oregon) and we assumed what we were seeing
was a reflection on the clouds from the lights of the mill at Toledo. We didn’t
think any more about it until we got back in the office at 5:00 AM and the
other survey team had left us a note: “did you see the aurora borealis?” Oh! Realization
hit. I felt embarrassed and also disappointed that we had missed out. If I had
known what we were looking at I would have stayed to appreciate it.
Since then, nothing. I check on days where the Aurora
Borealis Forecast says there is a decent chance, but nothing. Then a couple of
weeks ago (January 19th & 20th) there was another
one. My wife went to bed, and I told her that I would look when I went to bed
around midnight, and if there was anything there, I would wake her up. I
checked at midnight: nothing. For some reason, I woke up at 5:30 AM. I decided
to go check it out. I took my phone with me and stood at the end of the
driveway (I wasn’t going to drive all around looking for something that
probably wasn’t there). I thought I saw a very faint pinkish area of the
northeast sky. I got my phone out and took a picture. Yes, something there. I
switched my phone into night mode and took another picture. Wow! There it was.
I went inside and got my wife up. But getting from a deep sleep and then
dressed and then more clothes because it’s cold, took a while. By the time we
got out there it was gone. Oh well, at least I had a picture to show her.
Comments
Post a Comment