Great Lights in Heaven

Friday afternoon my brother Karl texted our family group text. "Look for the Aurora tonight. Biggest CME in years." I was very skeptical that we'd be able to see anything. Karl lives in Minnesota and served his mission in Quebec, but even he had never seen the Aurora before! Still, when Sam mentioned the solar storm too and said we ought to just go outside and look…just in case…I agreed that we should.

But then we forgot all about it and watched a movie with the girls and got ready for bed, and were just falling into bed around midnight with great sighs of satisfaction (I LOVE bedtime, it's the best part of the day) when suddenly I remembered the Aurora Borealis. "Should we bother looking??" we both said. We couldn't decide. But finally Sam said we'd be sorry if it was good and we didn't look, which was true. So we decided we'd just drive a little way out of the brightest city light and see if we could see anything. "If it's really good we could come back and wake the kids up," said Sam. "But it probably won't be," I said.

We got dressed again, and then the car was almost out of gas, of course, so we drove to get gas, and then I kept feeling nagging guilt about leaving the girls and Teddy. "What if they feel bad?" I said. "I know they'll want to see it if we see it." Sam finally got tired of my fretting and said "All right! Let's just go back for them!" So we did.

When we got home Sebastian was just getting home, and he decided he might as well go with us too, which meant we would have to switch into the van to fit everyone. (Malachi was coming home from work too and was too tired to join us, so he could stay home with the littlest ones asleep.) It all seemed like SUCH a bother for something that probably wasn't even going to be visible! But as we were getting shoes and blankets, and switching cars, and trying to wake up Teddy without waking up Ziggy, and bumping around looking for the camera in the dark—Seb and Sam looked up at the hill and said, "Wait a minute. That glow of city lights is in the wrong direction!" And they could see, too, faintly, that there were bright sort of waving lines in the sky. So they ran up the hill and took this picture:

Well! As soon as we saw that we were all very excited, because the sky is not dark at all from our hill, and if we could see it there, we thought we'd certainly see it somewhere darker! So we set off with renewed motivation.

Ky took and sent me a couple more pictures from our hill when he got home. The camera picks up the colors better than your eyes do, but there was something visible even without the camera. It was just sort of a nagging, hovering glow, with movement you could only see from your peripheral vision…disappearing if you looked straight at it. Ky said he could see that long streak of light in the above picture, but the rest of the colors were so dim he wouldn't have even noticed them if he hadn't been looking.

We drove out past Erda and Stansbury Park until there weren't any more lights. There were people and cars pulled off all along the highway looking at the sky! We could see glimpses of light and color as we drove. Then we pulled off onto a side road by the lake so we could get a better look. It was amazing! We were all so excited! We hadn't dreamed it would be anywhere near this visible. One thing that surprised me was the variety in color—I'd thought the Aurora would be mostly one color at each altitude. But there were all kinds of greens and purples and pinks and yellows.

Another thing that amazed me was the curtain-like effect of the light at times. I've seen that in pictures of the Aurora in Alaska, but I didn't think we'd see it even here! It really did look like broad sheets of colored light (cellophane, maybe) hanging down from some invisible attachment point, and then draping and waving and folding back and forth on each other as you watched them.

Out here where the sky was so dark, you really could see the color with your naked eye! And you could detect if the light was streaky or stripy or more of a diffused glow. The camera brightened the colors, but we were saying, "Oooh, look at those dark reds!" and "Oh, it's turning greener down on the bottom!" without even looking through the camera screen. You could see when the columns got taller or wider or brighter, and you could see them shimmer as they moved. I have never seen anything remotely like it. I was thinking about the prophecy of Samuel the Lamanite before Christ came to the Americas: "There shall be great lights in heaven." These were great lights!

Sebastian had brought the good camera, and I was so glad, because his pictures turned out amazing! That camera was better at capturing the contrasts than the phone camera was. I was under the impression it was really hard to get good pictures of the Aurora, and wasn't going to even bother with the real camera, but Seb said it wasn't actually that difficult. I had also thought you'd need long exposures to capture enough light, but the really long exposures actually didn't work as well. The aurora moved and shimmered too quickly. It was better to have only a 1- or 2- or 3-second exposure. I love the picture above, with those contrasting pinks and purples on the left side, and then a haze of yellow fading up into bright green. So vibrant!

You could clearly see the reflection of the lights in the water, too. This picture is from my phone so it's a lot fuzzier, but it does a good job of showing how bright and dimensional the lights looked. It wasn't just like a flat screen with light on it. You could tell they had depth.

The Aurora were definitely stripe-y at this first place we stopped. Bright and dark bands above the water.

And they got even stripe-ier after a few minutes! These really looked like beams from heaven! You can get an idea of how bright they are when you see that the lights of Salt Lake are glowing to the left of that mountain point. The lights in front of the mountain are Erda, and then to the left of it, that bright glow low down in the sky is Salt Lake City, and the Aurora are still much brighter above it. You can even see some of the wavy folds in this phone picture. I love the small clouds visible in front of the Aurora, too.

These aren't good videos, but they do a pretty good job of showing the constant movement of the lights. It's hard to describe how strange it is to see the sky just…moving.

In this second video, if you turn up the sound, you can hear an interesting creaking and crackling in the power lines. It only happened from time to time, as the Aurora got brighter and seemed to move more, so we think it was caused by the Aurora itself, inducing a current in the power line, perhaps. So interesting!

After a while we decided we'd see if we could find somewhere more removed from the headlights on the freeway, so we drove out a little further toward Stansbury Bay and Rowley. The stars were so bright out there! On a normal night we would have been marveling just at them. But the Aurora was too impressive!

By this time the sky had changed again. The Aurora became a lot wider and softer, less curtain-y. More like colored mist. And they were in more places in the sky. This bright swatch of light was to the west.

And in the real camera, it was a beautiful deep red color!

The greens didn't extend as far up into the sky

We could even see Aurora colors (faintly) on top of the Milky Way, to the east! That white glow down by the horizon is still Salt Lake City lights.

There was still some movement and shimmering

And some horizontal bands too!

We never got a view right up into the curtains like some people did. The light didn't ever get that far above us. This is my brother's picture from Minnesota:

where you could look straight overhead.

But we could see huge tall columns that grew and shrank visibly out of the bands of color below.

Daisy's middle name is Aurora—named for the dawn, not the Aurora Borealis, but now that we've seen these, it's for the Aurora Borealis too! :) She felt a special connection to this beautiful phenomenon, as if it was sent just specially for her. Maybe it was!

I really loved the soft, diffuse glow of the lights at this time. It wasn't as attention-getting as the stripes and columns, but it felt more otherworldly, like instead of seeing an event happening, you'd just been transported to some other planet with some other kind of sun and sky.

At 2:30 a.m. we reluctantly concluded that we probably should go home. We thought the Aurora Borealis would probably just get dimmer from this point on anyway. So we drove away, only to see such beautiful displays through our windows that we couldn't resist stopping again! The stripes were back, and this time there were also little cubes and stacks of light as if they shone from a big city full of buildings, each beaming a spotlight up into the sky. An elf city.

The colors also got surprisingly blue for a while. I didn't see that the rest of the time.

This was also my favorite view of the night, because the lights got really bright and spot-light-y again, and there were two distinct borders defining either side of the long sheet of color. The border lines were so bright!

We were ooh-ing and aah-ing in amazement (except for Junie and Goldie, who had fallen asleep in the car). It was like a fireworks show!

The colors changed from pink to purple to maroon

You can see them much more cleanly in the pictures from the real camera! The phone muddies them a bit.

This is what a slightly longer exposure looks like. You can't see as much definition in the Aurora. You can see the train going by in the foreground, though!

Elf city again

It got SO bright and SO pretty! It was amazing! Again, the camera does pick up the colors a little better…

but I tried to adjust this picture to about what we were seeing with our eyes. Still lots of color, lots of color variation, lots of line definition. Definitely still impressive.

We finally tore ourselves away again at 3 a.m., and didn't get home till 4! We were so tired! But it was so worth it! I woke up the next morning still excited and amazed at what we had seen, and wanting to tell everyone about it! Then Karl texted, "Now pull out your eclipse glasses and look for the giant sunspot that caused it.  Right edge." We looked at the sun and sure enough, there was the spot! Really several spots, I think. Who would think those solar storms could cause such beautiful things here on earth!

What an amazing, incredible world we live in! I love it so much! The Aurora Borealis is a sight I never thought I'd see in my life…especially not here in Utah!

Postscript: Gus was so excited when we told him about the Northern Lights and showed him our pictures the next day. He drew this picture of his own: