The View from a Drawbridge

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that we’ve just experienced the strongest solar storm in the past 20 years. According to this story on NPR’s Morning Edition, it was a G5, which is the highest level possible in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s scale. The world anticipated a great deal of havoc because of this storm.

Personally, it threw my GPS out of whack. It kept sending my location all over Seattle. That’s a serious hassle for someone as geographically challenged as I am.

This is also my second version of this blog post, because my computer deleted the first version without asking me. Poof. Gone. I spent about an hour hunting it down to no avail. (It wasn’t in the temp files or the recycle bin or anywhere else suggested by the help function. The fact that I rewrote it shows how much I love you, Dear Reader!)

Also, one of my dogs stayed up all night during this event. I can’t emphasize this enough: this never happens. Ever. We’ll never know why she did that, but I’m blaming the solar storm for lack of any other plausible answer. This storm also could have sent geomagnetically-induced currents to disrupt our power grid, overload our circuits, and cause blackouts.

What caused this solar storm? The sun is on an 11 year magnetic cycle, and it’s slated to reach solar maximum in 2025. On Wednesday, NOAA detected a cluster of massive sunspots, each one at least 17 times the diameter of earth. These spots cause coronal mass ejections, which basically look like ropes of plasma that shoot out and then arch back down to the sun’s surface. Check out the YouTube video that shows some of this solar activity below.

The upshot is that the sun threw charged particles at us. Lucky for us, those particles create the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights. Since this storm was so massive, those lights could be seen unusually far south. (Online, there are images of it as far south as Florida and Texas!)

Here’s a nifty explanation of what causes the various colors in an aurora that I found on Facebook:

I have always wanted to see the Northern Lights. I assumed I’d have to travel great distances to do so. I never expected to be able to see them from my own backyard, just south of Seattle, Washington.

But see them I did. Well… sort of. To my naked eye, they looked like a milky haze with  sharp edges. They constantly changed shape. I couldn’t see any color. However, when I pointed my phone’s camera at that haze and took pictures using the “night sight” setting, the aurora showed its true colors.

And here are some of the hundreds of photos Dear Husband and I took.

And here’s one that our niece (Hi, Chandra!) took in Ohio:

But our photographs pale in comparison to those taken by Sigma Sreedharan, a Seattle area Photographer. Check out all her amazing work here. Meanwhile, here’s one she took of the city skyline during this gorgeous cosmic event. At the time of this writing it hadn’t made it to her website yet, but she did post it on her Facebook group.

I’m sure you’ve also seen some impressive photos online. But I wanted to post ours here so that I’d never forget that evening, sitting on our Tommy Bahama folding chairs with DH, in our backyard, as our dogs looked on, mystified. The universe sure can put on a heck of a show when it feels like it.

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