The news been saying that this is a prime opportunity for aurora borealis viewing, but we'd heard that before and had never seen it. We went out around 10PM on 10/10 and there definitely was some red-pink glowing in the sky, but nothing spectacular. Sarah took some pictures though and it's amazing how much more sensitive to the aurora phenomenon the camera is than the human eye.
Se we went back inside and I got ready for bed. Then my sister texted and said we had to go back outside, it was amazing! So we did (me in pajamas and slippers) and it sure was amazing. We stayed out for about half an hour at the fork of our driveways and should have stayed out longer. I later went up on our third-floor deck and it was perhaps more amazing from up there.
What we saw was a pastel red-pink, almost fuchsia at times large streak of color coming from the Northeast. There was another long streak of lime green to the Southeast of that and basically parallel, but the green sometimes formed into a column and sometimes shimmered like a curtain. It was amazing how quickly the colors and shapes changed, from pastel pink to brick red in the one streak and from almost a soft yellow to Kelly green in the other. But it wasn't just two streaks, they were swirling to some degree and there were flashes of white, yellow, and blue kind of radiating from the Northeast but filling the whole sky in an instant. The white was so bright at times you would have thought it was a huge spotlight someone was shining on the scene from the Southwest. The three-dimensionality of it all was astounding too, with the red-pink glow making a background and the more brilliant streaks and flashes dashing in front of it. And in the background was a white shape that sometimes faded and sometimes came forward, like a low sine wave pattern along the Northern horizon.
Remember that this was what the camera saw, not what our eyes saw:
We wanted to stay but were getting too cold and so went in. As I say, I later went upstairs and watched some more. It was truly spectacular and now we can say we've seen the aurora borealis and also a full solar eclipse in the same year. It made me marvel at the wind from our small yellow dwarf star, at the geomagnetic dome protecting our even smaller planet, and at the fact that we measly humans live there and can look up and see evidence of the frightening but beautiful forces shaping our universe.
