Epic Northern Lights
For months we’ve been waiting for September to bring us darker skies and higher chances of visable solar activity. And as we anticipated September has been good so far. Last night we got our storm. It was a solar storm of epic proportions! During this year we’ve had several good displays of the aurora and many of our customers went home quite happy with what they saw. But I knew there was a better, bigger storm coming at some point. All the data indicated that this year and next year (September 2024) would be extremely good for auroras, but until it happens, nothing is guaranteed. I subscribe to two sources(spaceweather.com and the app AuroraAlerts) for aurora updates and on Saturday I received several text messages showing big solar flares had occurred. On Sunday we informed all the guests to pay attention to the skies and suggested they start looking north as soon as it gets dark. At 8:30 pm last night I started watching the sky intently. Even though it wasn’t fully dark, the sky showed a faint glow in patches in the twilight. Then aroung 9 pm it was very dark and we could make out a hazy glow over the lake. It looked quite faint to the naked eye but with my camera set at 1600 ISO and a f4 setting I was able to capture this with a 25 second exposure…
There was no movement or anything spectacular just a hazy glow. We watched this for about 20 minutes and then most of the guests started going back to their cabins. I checked the data and it indicated that the solar storm was large and growing so I decided to wait it out. Then this happened…
I had moved over to the beach by this point and was standing in front of cabin 3 when I saw a sudden swirl in the sky. I had my camera all set up on the tripod “just in case” and I quickly reached out and opened the shutter. The swirl wasn’t super bright and I was nervous if it would show up. 25 seconds seemed to take forever and when I heard the shutter close I quickly pushed the display image button on my camera. Yes, I had captured the swirl! I was ecstatic. As I watched the sky continued to have little swirls and I texted Kasey telling her to come back down. I quickly ran around to cabins and told everyone to come over to the beach. I got back to my tripod just as the sky did this.
Above where the swirl had been there was suddenly a very definitive ripple motion in the sky. Snapping another picture this is what we saw. By this time people were starting to really “ooh and ahh”, but I had a feeling we hadn’t seen the best yet. After about 5 minutes of a single area rippling with silver and faint green this happened.
Beams of light started to shoot up out of the ripples! The faint oohs and ahhs of a few minutes prior turned to shrieks from the dozen plus people standing around watching the horizon. After making sure that my wife’s parents, who weren’t on the beach area were watching, we sat there watching the lights dance. Then I happened to look straight above me and my jaw dropped.
Directly overhead, high above the trees was a silvery green wave. I yelled out to the others on in the area and encouraged them to look straight up. I went and laid on the lawn with my camera pointing straight up and snapped a picture of the sky rippling above me. Having seen the northern lights over 100 times in my life, this was one of only 3 times I can remember with the lights dancing directly overhead! But even as stunned as I was, it was about to get even better…
As I looked back at the water the entire sky exploded with swirls, ripples, waves and beams of light shooting and dancing all over. Sitting there on the lawn, almost unable to move, I barely dared to breathe, worried that if I blinked it might be gone and I would miss it. For about 3 minutes no one made a sound. We were all too mesmerized. A few minutes later Kasey pointed out that the incredible part is that we weren’t even facing north. We were in fact facing west! So we headed back over to the main dock area to see what was going on in the north. This is what we found…
West, north, east, everywhere we looked the sky was dancing. Standing there I turned around 180 degrees and looked due south. Even in the south I could see the lights dancing across the sky. So, for the first time in my life, I took a picture of the northern lights dancing to the south of us.
Again it was a first. I’ve taken hundreds of photos over the years of the auroras and never seen one while facing south. In the picture you can see the lights from cabins 4, 6, 9 and the retreat windows. What an amazing show God was putting on in the sky. And to put a cherry on top, several cabins had people who had traveled up here on our recommendation to see the lights. One couple was from Louisiana and had called me in the spring to plan the trip and after looking at the moon calendar and such I recommended this week to them. Also, Kasey’s parents really wanted to see the northern lights and she had convinced them to come up at this time. They were pretty impressed. We all were. After a while we noticed the lights weren’t as bright and decided we needed to go to bed so we could work today. Around 11 pm we told everyone good night and went to bed. What an amazing night to sit there and watch the northern lights dance all around us!
