They drove 1,000 miles for an Ozzy show, two days for a Jayhawks game. And when it was clear, they’d park her in the middle of nowhere, sit on the hood, and watch the stars… for hours… without saying a word. – Chuck, Supernatural 5.22 “Swan Song”
No doubt Sam and Dean would have driven for days to find the perfect, isolated, unlit spot to see the night sky on May 10, 11 and 12, 2024. Going far beyond the brilliance of the stars, unusually strong solar flares and coronal mass ejections interacted with the Earth’s magnetic field to create a spectacular display of color that would have awed even these two hunters, who were more accustomed than most to dealing with supernatural phenomena.
Sam would have told Dean that Friday’s night’s solar eruptions were rated G5 (extreme), “the strongest solar storm to reach Earth in two decades — and possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years.”1 Saturday and Sunday’s shows were rated G3 (strong) meaning they couldn’t be seen nearly as far south, nor nearly as bright, as Friday’s glimpse into the universe. Dean probably would have rolled his eyes at his brother’s need to understand the science behind the beauty. But both boys would have loved the show, sitting on Baby’s hood for hours, hoping for a few moments of ethereal peace.
As for myself, early Saturday morning, I accidentally stumbled across our neighbor’s 2:30 a.m. Facebook photo of the sky’s colors at a local park. Living in my little bubble of family responsibilities and crises, I don’t remember knowing that another rare celestial show was promised for this Spring. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time to see last month’s total solar eclipse, and having now been alerted to the fact that we’d already missed Friday’s Northern Lights, I wasn’t about to miss another “once-in-a-lifetime” display of celestial wonder. As my name “Nightsky” might imply, seeing the Northern Lights is high on my bucket list.
While it was exciting to see any color at all in my neighbor’s photo, the hues were faint and they covered a fairly small area of the sky. So I pulled the “it would be a nice Mother’s Day outing” excuse to justify a totally out-of-character impromptu scramble to hit the road. In true hunter tradition, my husband and I threw one day’s worth of clothing into a bag to leave town unexpectedly and escape the lights of the big city.
Given the time of day, we drove to a secluded town at 41° North latitude in Michigan’s “Harbor Country”. Arriving literally moments after sunset, we had just enough time to park on a back street and hike down to a pitch-black Lake Michigan shoreline to see the promised night sky magic.
I’ve already confessed that this wasn’t something we had researched or planned, so we didn’t have any idea what to expect. Instead, we set up two camping chairs facing the northern sky and naively waited for something to happen. Once our eyes adjusted, we realized we weren’t entirely alone. There were several other small groups of hopeful watchers around us, standing together, huddled on the ground on blankets, or sitting in twos on portable chairs. It was mostly silent though, as if in the pews of a church, waiting to see the hand of God at work.
It was about 50°F, but it was damp this close to the waterfront. The wind was calm and the sky was crystal clear. Just like Sam and Dean, we watched meteors and satellites go on their way while the two of us waited, side by side, for the show to begin. There was a small crescent moon that arced across the water, giving us some light but not enough to blind us to the abundant stars. And we waited. It was clear, we had parked in the middle of nowhere, and we were sitting and watching the stars… for hours… without saying a word. It was perfect.
At about 11pm, I saw vertical white streaks of light appear across the entire northern horizon. I anxiously thought, “It’s starting!”… but then nothing happened. The streaks faded and the sky returned to normal. Huh. I guess I expected the Northern Lights would appear all night long, but with each moment I sat there, I gained more insight into the elusiveness of this rare treat of nature.
At approximately 12.35 am, the people behind us started talking excitedly. Other groups around us raised their phone cameras and started staring through them at the sky. What was happening? Those vertical white streaks of light had appeared in the sky again, but there was certainly no color anywhere to be seen! What were they all looking at?? “If these white lights are all we’re going to get, I better snap a picture of them before they disappear again,” I thought, so I joined the crowd and raised my phone to point at the northern sky.
Here is what I saw:
I nearly fell out of my chair! I lowered the phone to look back at the sky with my naked eyes, but just as before, the sky was entirely black except for those few, faint vertical wisps of light. Not believing the dichotomy of what we were seeing, I raised the phone to look at the sky through its lens instead of my eyes’ lenses. Again, it saw SO much more than us:
So I started scanning the entire horizon with my phone, looking at a 180° expanse of unobstructed sky over glistening water through a 3”x 6” screen. The view was unbelievable:
To this day, I don’t know if I was more dumbstruck by the majesty of the colors we were seeing in the phone’s lens or the utter contradiction of the blackness our eyes were telling us was there in the sky. So I just kept snapping pictures.
The blackness of the night required several seconds of shutter exposure to capture each image, so the pictures did not record every moment of the aurora.
Still, I took as many pictures as my stunned mind could fathom.
And the colors just kept changing. Every second, in every direction, the colors just kept changing.
We didn’t observe any “dancing” of colors. They weren’t swirling, or changing direction as so many others reported seeing in different locations.
But the colors we saw continuously transformed each horizontal layer of the sky into a kaleidoscope of vivid, deep iridescence.
The greens and yellows were fading, while the reds and pinks were emerging.
12 pictures in all, which doesn’t seem like a lot now but seemed at the time like I was working the shutter non-stop.
Sadly, my husband didn’t take any pictures at all. His color blindness and recent eye surgery kept him from seeing through his phone what I was seeing through mine. He simply didn’t know where to point his lens. So we snuggled as close together as possible and he looked through my phone at the sun’s finger painting of our night sky.
10 minutes. That’s all we were granted of this indescribable joy until it dissipated as quietly as it appeared.
When it was over, we and a few other diehard souls waited on that quiet beach for this glory to return.
An hour later, the white streaks appeared again. My hopes rose, sure that we were being granted an encore of brilliant light. But a beautiful red/rose pillar was all that appeared this time.
Everyone else abandoned the vigil at 1:45 am. At 2:04 a.m., another stream of white light appeared, but it was more blurred and vague, and shared with us an equally diffuse pastel red sky.
We kept watch until 2:15am, but even under 4 layers of hunters’ clothing plus 2 blankets, we were freezing. It was just too damp, and the moon had set so it was perilously black as pitch on the beach now. We were alone, and unlike Sam and Dean, I didn’t feel we could defend ourselves from any spooky thing that might crawl out of the woods at night. So we left the tapestry of the sky to the stars.
After a few hours of sleep, we awoke to learn that Saturday night’s show had been rated a G3. Extraordinary, but not nearly as strong as Friday’s “extreme” G5. We spend a beautiful blue sky day absorbing the sun’s heat on the beach on Sunday before heading to a last-minute reservation for a Mother’s Day dinner. Dead tired, we hit the highway for home.
Crossing time zones, we arrived home at 9:30 pm. We were blurry-eyed from the previous night’s marathon, but Sunday night’s show was predicted to be a G4. Dare we try this again?
Yes, we dare.
So we dropped our bags at the door and got back in the car to see if we could find a farm road somewhere far west of us that might be dark enough to see the Aurora Borealis just 50 miles outside of Chicago’s lights.
Alas, we were not as lucky on Sunday. It was very hard to find a back road that was dark enough yet allowed a clear view of the horizon. Why were there so many trees in farm country?? Also, although predicted to clear, clouds moved across the horizon all night. There were breaks in the cloud cover, so we kept searching for a shoulder on a dark, deserted road, but the navigation was difficult. Persistent, we finally found a driveway inlet that faced north, so we pulled over and turned off the car. This was certainly warmer than last night but not nearly as picturesque.
Somewhere around midnight, we were blinded by a spotlight that shone into our car by a passing truck. Much like the danger that Sam and Dean face with their late-night, clandestine adventures, we were being approached by a curious local sheriff wondering what we were doing staking out an empty field in the middle of the night. We explained our scientific exploration, so he let us stay a while, but the clouds were not as cooperative. We left for home, disappointed that we didn’t get a chance to see the lights once again. This time we would have known what to look for, but one glimpse at Heaven’s gates was all we were to be granted this weekend.
What a wondrous miracle of nature. I still hope to see the swirling Northern Lights with my own eyes someday, but this was a beautiful memory for which I will be forever grateful. Please share your pictures and stories if you were also lucky enough to see what Sam and Dean might have seen from Baby’s hood that night.
Feel free to share this photo gallery with friends, but please don’t copy my or anyone else’s photos. I share them with you because not everyone was lucky enough to see what we saw.
- https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/how-nasa-tracked-the-most-intense-solar-storm-in-decades/
Also, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/05/12/northern-lights-stun-americans-again-forecast-for-sunday/73656413007/